And Above, The Vaulted Sky
by YellowFlicker
Summary: "Who are you?" he asks her but something tells him she's not going to answer. She tilts her head a little to the side. That playful smile reminds him of lips he used to know, but this one has the edge of violence curling on its corner. As he expected, the answer doesn't come. She asks her own question instead, a barbed challenge. "Who do you want me to be? [Shipwrecks AU]
1. prologue

_i am the loved, the yearned for, the praised,_  
 _the vilified, the condemned and the hunted._  
 _but one thing in me remains unchanged:_  
 _i have you all on your knees_

 _\- Salma Deera **,** Letters From Medea_

When Waller doesn't release them after their rushed first aid, Shaw is pissed, but not surprised. Nor is he surprised when she doesn't look up as he and Michaels enter the conference room, too busy perusing the updated files they'd almost died for to acknowledge their presence.

As she reads, Shaw imagines what it would be like to level the barrel of his 38 at her smug sculpted face and put a bullet hole through and out the back of her skull. He imagines the gore of the gaping hole in the back of her head, ruining her perfectly coiffed hairdo; the blood spatter on the wall behind her, the little pieces of brain and skull mixing in. Her lifeless, expressionless face as blood drains out.

That's what dreams are for, huh?

He rubs the side of his face instead and ends up wincing when his fingers make contact with the skin directly under his brow. Some wacko with a sword almost split his face two earlier that night, leaving him with one hell of a gash over his eyebrow. Which would be fine - chicks dig scars, right? - except for the fact that his face feels like it's got a second heart under his goddamned cheekbone, 'cause the motherfucker just wouldn't stop punching until Michaels split his skull open with her 38. That woman's unnatural aim has saved his life more times than Shaw can count. (That's a lie - he knows the exact number).

Shaw sighs heavily. Fucking League of Assassins motherfuckers. Brainwashed asslicks, the lot of 'em. Missions like these make him miss the simplicity of hunting down rebels in the jungles of the cracks ass of nowhere with boots that used to skin his feet. So really, excuse the fuck out of him if all he wants after getting all up close and personal with those nutjobs is some good oxy, food, a blowjob and a shower - the last two preferably at the same time - before passing out somewhere horizontal.

Instead, he has to sit his ass on the most uncomfortable chair on the planet and listen to the dry staccato of Waller's stiletto's punctuating the silence. The steady drumming is an impatient sound that juxtaposes Waller's blank face as she reads.

A wry, unpleasant smile twists Shaw's mouth. He may not be a genius, but he does know patterns and intent when they cross under his nose, and Waller - she is all about intent. There is nothing about the woman that is not calculated. Even her freaking footwear is used to make a point: a tick-tacking sound designed to make the fine hair on her operative's arms stand to attention whenever they hear it from the end of the hall. She always knows what she's doing, there is always a 'why' and she doesn't give a fuck about who bleeds along the way, as long as the job gets done.

Case in point, here they sit, two of her best fresh out of the field, with the stench of sweat, dust and blood and fuck knows what, coming off the both of them like vapor… and they stay, like obedient dogs, waiting for her to finish her file. 'Cause when the Wall says 'jump', all you get to say is 'how high'.

Bitch!

He looks to his left, to where Michaels is sitting, straight-backed and as alert as ever, despite the cracked ribs and the hastily patched up second-degree burns on her arms. The left side of her face looks like raw meat and it's starting to build up a swell nice enough to rival Rocky fucking Balboa. If she had been anyone else, Michaels would have grimaced - but, Shaw thinks with a silent snort, that is the god damned Harbinger sitting over there! Michaels is too well trained to show outward signs of distress. And Shaw… well, Shaw is just as well trained, but he doesn't have Michaels' unflappability and he hates Waller enough to push her as far as she dares.

So he slumps even more in the uncomfortable as fuck chair, lifts his feet on the one next to it and lights up a cigarette. Michaels gives him some side-eye, but Shaw just winks at her and goes back to checking the profiles on the large screens nailed to the wall in front of him.

The League of Assassins aren't as much of a secret as they liked to believe they are. Bodies that drop unexpectedly tend to create unmistakable trails. What they are, is a formidable force (and one that Waller has avoided antagonizing for a long time, despite them being what they are and doing what they do). Their talents at taking lives is not what Waller is interested in however. Nor is her attention captivated by the void of power left, now that almost half the League has basically disintegrated.

What the Wall is looking for, is potential acquisitions.

The list of people whose names and kill-tolls litters the multiple screens in front of them is proof of it. Now they have real names (as real as they can get, anyway) and more importantly, faces, to go with the profiles.

Nyssa Raatko, aka Nyssa al Ghul - daughter of the Demon himself, apparently. International assassin who has dropped bodies in about fifty-eight different states, wanted under different identities in fifteen of them. Until lately, Waereth al Ghul and as of twenty-four hours ago, the new Ra's of what's left of her League.

Shaw recons that panther's gonna come down the wall of fame soon. When she was just another knife in the dark, Waller might have gotten hold of her, cause there is nobody better than on her in getting people to act against their will and wellbeing, but now that Raatko is Head of the Freaking Demon, that babe is way out of Waller's reach.

To Raatko's left there's a picture of the one known as Taer al Safer - the Canary… aka Sara fucking Lance! If Shaw hadn't seen that girl snap the neck of a man twice her size like it was a fucking twig, he wouldn't have believed it.

Lost at sea about seven years ago, presumed dead. Well, she ain't so dead anymore!

Her resume is more modest than Raatko's, but then again she only stated recently. Just as brutal, though. Mentioning her efficiency is at this point redundant – the League doesn't make sloppy killers. Though Lance is a bit… messier than the average League killing machine. She has a whole range of issues she works off on her targets – violently speaking. There's a lot of un-dealt rage in that kid.

But then again, Shaw's not one to talk.

There are others in Waller's hall of fame. Killers, fanatics, terrorists, anarchists. People who were born to take lives and people who were warped into doing it. People with a talent for murder, but who chose not to apply it – like the Gotham freaks and those in Central City. Batgirl, Catwoman…

In the last year, Helena Bertinelli got upgraded to it when she decided to get herself a mask and go around killing mobsters. That in itself was no strange thing, but her efficiency was something the Wall wouldn't overlook. Shaw gathered the file on that babe himself – couldn't really say he didn't enjoy it. He's rarely seen a finer ass on anyone.

He takes a long drag off his cigarette, eyes fixed on Sara Lance's face. Looking at her without knowing anything about her would make one think the word 'angelic' was made to describe that face. But that's the kind of sappy bullshit only gorgeous women yank out of the old dusty corners of him, from time to time. The photo is recent, snapped in passing in a hospital hallway. That dimpled chin of hers is cute and looking at her mouth makes it hard not to imagine it wrapped around his dick, but those blue eyes – they are ice.

They're all real nice-looking birds, Waller's killer pets. And born predators, the lot of 'em.

Shaw knows their kind: they're the sort of women that scream trouble and smile like sharks. You see them and your brain starts going off like a fucking World War II alarm, but you still manage to ask them for their number. It's the only kind Shaw has ever wanted to get between the legs of, but these babies… they could probably pull your nuts through your nostril in about 47 different ways. Not the kind of women you'd survive antagonizing.

Especially the Lance kid. The Canary, that is. She's themed, that one, with a real taste for cutting men to pieces. She's not even subtle about it – though to be fair, it has been a couple of years since some would-be rapist was found in some alleyway choking on his own dick.

Michaels types on her iPad and their latest profile (or oldest, depending on one's point of view) gets updated with a picture… and Shaw finds his spine straightening, the pinch behind his neck making his hands itch for a weapon.

He knows this one.

Well, he knows of her, anyway. He really doubts there is anyone on this planet who knows her. But there are enough whispers about her going around in the dark side of the world to make Shaw's stomach drop, even just looking at that face as a lifeless picture on a screen.

The picture of what seems to be a teen on a rebellious faze stares back at him. Black hair with the occasional burst of violet through it, frames a longish, pale face. The dark make-up she has on is immediate and draws her every feature into the exact sharp relief she wants it to. Shaw has spent enough time with female infiltration operative to know a mask when he sees one: it's there to distract and take center stage on her most vulnerable point of contact: her face. A mask that she will shed like snakes change skin, and nobody will be the wiser. It's there maybe to age her up a little too, and yet it only manages to yank into visibility how painfully young she is.

The lines of that young face are pulled in a pitiless look and there is enough awareness of it in her eyes, to make that ghost of a smirk on her dark-painted lips terrifying. She's looking right into the camera, dead center, and straight into his eyes… and maybe that's fitting. Maybe this picture really is the summary of who this - this thing really is: she only gets caught when she wants to be.

The debacle on the CIA base in Kandahar three years ago proves it. He'd almost died that day. His every breath is a reminder that he is alive just because she had decided to let him live, and that knowledge gnaws at him.

He hates her for it the way he's never really hated anyone. A fucking burdensome hate. He feels tainted by her; by that game of control she played that he can't seem to break free of.

I own your life.

Shaw takes a deep breath and focuses on that face, wondering not for the first time if emptying a clip in that girl will set him free.

Girl… A lifetime of preexistent thought-pattern can't but point the obvious out to him: she's chillingly young. Is she even 20? Shaw repeats that in his head, and yet no matter how many times he says it, he can't bring himself to give the thought full credence. He's seen too much of the destruction she's sown to for age to matter. It's those like her that are the truly dangerous ones, in Shaw's experience: not because of what her makers warped her into, but because she's so fucking good at it. Because she has the kind of talent for effortless mayhem that it could split one's blood.

That girl was born to end lives…

No wonder Waller wants her so much she's wet with it every time her name comes up on their back-channels.

Wants her… Shaw snorts. He knows what the Wall wants. It's not the killer that has her salivating; she has plenty of killers on her leash.

She wants the invisible shadow. The nameless, placeless girl-shaped weapon that can be anyone and get anywhere. Who doesn't know the meaning of impossible and never leaves a single trace of herself behind – literally. The files ARGUS has on her - on the ones who bore that name before her, are proof of it: the only evidence they could gather to string her hits together was the fact that there was no evidence! Whatever the mission, the problem would be impeccably put-together, creatively solved; the solution immaculately organized and flawlessly executed. She left nothing behind: no fingerprint, no signature.

There was no ego. Just the job.

Maybe because there was no real person with a true self, behind that face. Maybe Waller was right: she really is whatever her masters want her to be, and nothing more. Maybe that's why most of the Intelligence community don't even believe she exists.

"She's too young." Shaw says to nobody in particular, eyes never leaving the photo. The list of the hits they suspect her for is longer than anyone else's. It's impossible for this kid to be the one they're looking for.

"Titles in the League can be hereditary. If she is who we think she is, then she was the apprentice of the last one who held the name." Michaels corrects him, even more impatient with imprecision as usual. "The original Spider could very well be dead."

Shaw huffs.

"Yeah, no shit." He mumbles. "She's still too young."

The Spider, he repeats quietly in his head, unable to help the sneer that name causes him.

They make you give up your name and chose another, when you're initiated in the League. The Canary, the Tiger, the Ax, the Wolf. Nice little depersonalization tactic: an animal or a weapon. Anything but human.

The Spider - That's what ARGUS calls her now. They used to have many names for her. The Widow. The Red Death. The Eastern Shadow. Nobody ever knew where she was from, but there were those that insisted she was Asian. Clearly not anymore… Who the fuck knows anyway? Whispers about her started more than eighty years ago.

Waller closes the file with a snap and sets it down. She doesn't sit, choosing instead to plant her fingertips on the cool glass table and lean on them a bit, doing a pretty good impression of a coiling snake getting ready to strike as she stares at him and Michaels in turns. The downwards turn of her lips doesn't speak of any good things in Shaw's future and damn it, he's too tired for one of Waller's tantrums for missing one toy out of her precious collection of psychopaths!

"Agent Michaels, you were the head officer of this operation."

"Yes ma'am." Michaels nswers evenly.

"Explain to me then, how it is that you failed so spectacularly." Waller's dark eyes cut from Michaels to him. She's using that familiar tone Shaw hates: she already knows the answer but wants them to spell out their failure. It's part of the punishment; that way she can keep her hands clean of it and lay it all on their incompetence.

The Wall: What. A. Woman.

"We secured the virus itself and made sure it was the last batch to make it out intact. There were no civilian casualties and no need for a drone strike to contain an infection that did not happen. Every objective of the operation was fully met, ma'am."

Shaw feels his eyebrows rise a bit and then tempers his reaction. As far as explanations go, that is not a bad one, but both Shaw and Michaels know that that is not what Waller is talking about.

As if to make a point of that, Waller straightens, thundering expression frozen by the ice-cold rage hardens her eyes and the line of her mouth.

"Are you playing me for a fool, agent."

Shaw feels the hair on the back of his neck rise up a bit at that tone.

"No ma'am."

"Then answer the fucking question," Waller snaps, her mouth a thin line of anger.

Michaels doesn't even breathe differently.

Goddamn…

"I believe I already did."

Shaw almost chokes on his spit. Well, you gotta admire the woman's nerve. It's like watching someone shove the barrel of a gun in their mouth, but still, Shaw has to recognize Balls of Steel when he sees them.

Anger radiates off Waller like a cold draft, sucking all warmth and air of out the space around her, creating a vacuum.

She narrows her eyes at her best operative. "You disobeyed direct orders, agent."

"I had no orders pertaining Felicity Smoak."

"She is the Spider!" Waller says slapping her hand the file with a thud. "Apprehending her is always a standing order."

"There was no evidence at all to indicate even the hint of a connection between the Spider and Felicity Smoak, so there was no way for me to be sure - and I was not willing to risk my mission and thousands of lives on a hunch." Michaels says steadily.

The calm she is facing this with is exemplary… and a bit insulting. Waller doesn't miss either.

"Do you think this is a game, Michaels?" she says then, with the kind of calm that hides something meaner.

"No ma'am." Michaels answers tonelessly, as if this is just another debriefing. No hesitation at all. That doesn't surprise him though. In all the years he's known her, he's started to believe that Michaels is physically capable hesitating.

"Then do tell what the fuck do you think you're playing at, because you're starting to damage my calm."

Michaels finally blinks. She purses her lips for a moment and then speaks. "Permission to speak freely, ma'am."

Waller purses her lips and for a moment Shaw thinks she's not going to agree to informality when she's so hellbent on grilling them for meatballs, but then the impossible happens.

Waller's lips thin even more, but then she sits down and one blink later she's as collected and detached as ever.

"Permission granted." Waller says crisply.

Michaels takes a breath, exasperation coating her face as if her mask just slipped off. The effect is staggering: it's like watching two different people living beneath the same skin. Maybe his inability to split himself into many different people is what had first ruled Shaw out as an infiltration operative, years ago.

"There was no goddamned way I would have been able to contain her even if I had been sure she is who you think she is." Michaels says then, tiredness coating her tone despite its inherent steadiness. "She would have killed us all and for all I know, Queen would have helped her do it."

Waller snorts. "I doubt Mister Diggle would have allowed that."

Michaels' eyebrow twitches. It's all the room her irritation has to breathe before she squashes it.

"That kid just went to war with one of the most powerful and deadly organizations on the planet to win her freedom back. You think she would have stopped at John Diggle? Come on Amanda, you know better."

Waller leans back on the chair but instead of making her look relaxed the action seems to be a step closer to formality.

"Felicity Smoak is too dangerous and most of all - too volatile - to be left roaming loose. She needs to be apprehended." Waller says firmly

Michaels sighs. "The Spider needs to be apprehended but the fact is that we don't know who she is or even if she's…"

"Every piece of evidence you brought me-"

"Was flimsy and circumstantial, at best!" Michaels interrupts, impatience seeping into her tone. "I could have been saying those same things about Sara Lance, if she had stuck around long enough for me to try to profile her! And I was the only operative on the field making these connections. We are an intelligence agency! As your second in command, I cannot and will not approve of any mission based on a single individual's uncorroborated opinion, even if it's my own."

Waller leans forward, eyes hot with rage.

"She has a goddamend fire-brand on her back!" She snarls, so uncharacteristically loudly that Shaw's spine tingles. "That is not the kind of thing you just blink and miss, Lyla?"

Her voice ricochets around the glass walls and leaves only silence behind.

Michaels' even and steady voice, colorless and bloodless, is a stark contrast. "With all due respect Amanda, I did not ask the girl to strip."

Shaw values his life, so he keeps his amusement mute.

The silence that falls is the one that permeates the air like the stench of a three days old corpse in the desert. Shaw doesn't even dare breathe. He honestly feels lucky that he's been forgotten and he's happy to stay that way until this is over. Playing dead rarely works with the Wall - she has a funny way of smelling bullshit - but it's his first instinct.

It's long, heavy moments before either of the women speaks again.

"Felicity Smoak is a highly trained, highly dangerous human weapon." Waller says evenly, enunciating slowly to drive the words home, as if somehow it was the failure to understand them that played a part into Michaels letting the girl slip away. "She is intelligent, yes, but even the highest caliber rifle is - at best - useless without someone aiming it; at worst, lethal. She is most of all, volatile." Waller bites the word off like it's a curse. "Too volatile for her leash to be in the hands of an ex-AGUS agent with questionable ethics and narrow worldview."

"I understand that." Michaels confirms.

"No, I don't think you do." Waller snaps, biting off those last few words in open anger. If Shaw hadn't know before just how much this woman wants her claws into that girl, this would be the moment he would have understood it. "It's been made painfully clear how easy a marks she is by howeffortlessly Oliver Queen - a man of scarcely above average intelligence - was able to manipulate her for his own ends."

"I don't think…"

"Yes, I know what you think, Lyla." Waller interrupts deliberately, her voice even and implacable. "You think she made a choice. What you do not seem to understand is that she is not capable of choice. She wasn't made that way."

Michaels shakes her head. "That might have been true at one moment or another in time, but as it stands, that piece of intelligence has proved to be outdated."

"And that's where you'd be wrong." Waller states, raising her chin a fraction, to drive her conviction home. "We don't know if Felicity Smoak is the Spider or not. But we do know that she is part of the League, and as a member of it, she has been conditioned by the programming that is part of her training to react a certain way, given a certain command. Nyssa al Ghul was the one who made a choice. She just so happened to have slipped Felicity Smoak's leash out of her Ra's hands when she did."

"We don't know the details of her programming." Michaels reminds her with the last bit of open ground for personal opinion she has left. "She could have broken through it. Old thought-patterns crack even the most complex layers of programming all the time – we've seen it. She was wide awake when I met her, and completely independent emotionally."

"She is a lab rat." Waller retorts, managing to sound both obvious and dismissive. "She is whatever whoever is controlling her wants her to be. If Queen wanted her to be emotionally available to him, that that's what she became. That is what you saw."

If Shaw had never had a reason to want this woman dead, she would have just given him one right now. It's not that she strips people of agency. It's that she considers them stupid for it.

Waller straightens, and the mask of professionalism and cold detachment is back in place. Informal talk is over. Michaels senses it immediately and reacts to it. Her poker face is back on faster than Shaw can take a full breath through cracked ribs.

"Your repeated failure to understand something as crucial as this is why you'll be removed from the care here onwards. You're dismissed, Agent."

"Yes ma'am."

Michaels leaves the room silently as she entered it. Waller then turns her eyes to him and Shaw groans internally.

"Agent Shaw. Did you gather the information I asked you to?"

He sighs.

"No ma'am." Shaw admits and seen the danger solidify in Waller's eyes even as he speaks. "I couldn't even break the first firewall and by the time I got close to it, she had a gun to my head. But…" He takes the USB drive out of his pocket and slides it on the glass. Waller catches it without even looking at it. "I did manage to make a partial copy of the base programming of her virus. Its…"

He takes a deep breath, tries to find the words.

"What?" Waller snaps. Patience is not among her virtues and if there are any the Wall would fake it for, well – it's safe to saw Shaw is not among them.

"Well, it's unlike anything I've ever fucking seen… ma'am." he adds, like an afterthought. "It's like a goddamned cancer growing at the back of the internet's head and nobody ever even noticed it. I'm willing to bet she used it to hack ARGUS a couple of times and nobody had a clue."

Waller stills, eyes come back to train on him. Her scrutiny feels like ice water down the back of his head.

"So she's a cybernetics expert too?"

Shaw shrugs. "It would explain a lot. Especially how she gets a hold of information she has no business knowing."

Waller considers this carefully. Shaw can practically see the wheels of her brain turning and he wishes to Lucifer he were anywhere else right now, because he knows what's coming. He can sense it the way animals sense danger.

"I'm making you the head of the Hornet operation." Waller states and this time Shaw's groan does not stay silent.

"Goddamit!" He hisses and leans his head back.

Waller pretends she didn't hear that. She's probably only allowing it because she knows she's just given him the choice between suicide by glock or by sword.

"This ain't the kinda thing I can say not to, is it?"

Waller doesn't react to that either, but gives him that 'look' that Shaw feels like a steel blade at the base of his dick.

Right on, then.

"I want her brought in." She says instead. Shaw pretends not to notice the fire of greed burning behind her dark eyes. It so fucking creepy he'd rather tell himself he's not seeing it form this close. "I want her alive and undamaged in any permanent way, Shaw."

As if he needed to be reminded. Shaw slumps even further on his chair.

A sword it is, then.

A hundred and forty seven miles away from the ARGUS's glass building, Oliver punches the gas pedal even further down and the car speeds through the highway like a bullet, just the way she likes it. She lets the wind pick up her hair and swirl it around her head, tickling the sides of her face, enjoys the way the setting sun is still warm and washes everything in red and gold, like in a dream.

It's not a dream. It's real.

This is really her, breathing with her own lungs free air as a free person. The laughter that that provokes in her comes from a quiet place of deep contentment within her that she didn't think she would ever find.

And when she lets her head fall back, eyes closed and her fingers twisting in his sleeve, Oliver smiles too


	2. children of the night

**_1\. children of the night_**

* * *

 _(un)kind_

 _This morning I shoved a bird_  
 _down my throat so I could hide all the (not)nice._

 _(smart). (brave)._

 _It scratched against my throat as I pushed it down but_  
 _by the time I had vomited it back into the sink it was dead._

 _by hinatashoyyo_

* * *

If the League had taught Sara anything, it would be that if you were determined and resourceful enough, anyone could be killed. Spending a little more time doing the its work outside Nanda Parbat's old stone walls and flickering shadows however, had taught Sara a subtler truth: killing was easy. Most of the time, it wasn't even the point.

Tonight was a good example of that.

Sara thumbed the corner of her small clutch, smoothed down the creases of the floor-length skirt. She felt more exposed than she was comfortable with, but long gone were the days when dressing for an undercover op in the kind of clothes she'd never willingly wear made her fidgety. She still hated that it was silk, though. The shimmery thing might be the best at bending light and deflecting it so that the cameras wouldn't get a clear shot of her face, but motion detectors would catch it from a mile away. Not to mention that it was impossible to hide a knife anywhere on her person and without at least two of them Sara always felt naked. The small stiletto blade hidden in the elegant twist of her hair wasn't quite the same thing.

Sara had never thought high-fashion and wetwork would mix, but when you're chasing the Chancellor of Austria all the way to the Bolshoi premiere of Bellini's 'Norma', you have to dress the part. She felt like a walking cliche, but to be fair, she'd gone through far cheesier covers to get a job done. The whole getup was impressive actually. The kind floor-length, red slinky thing that Laurel would have loved… and that had been a staggering realization.

It had come to her unbidden when she'd been getting ready earlier that night. Sara had taken one look in the long mirror, hair still undone, and it had been her sister on prom night staring back. (Laurel wasn't blonde anymore. Laurel hadn't let blonde back into her hair in five years) It had felt like getting kicked hard in the back of head, actually, and it had shaken Sara so deeply her hands had been unsteady as she'd pinned back her hair a little tighter than necessary. It was why she was still thinking about a goddamed dress instead of, say, going over the plan of action once she left the slow-moving car.

Just how close to her conscious mind had that knowledge hovered? How much had it informed her choice?

She hadn't even realized… Or had she?

God Damnit!

This was the kind of wondering that Sara did not allow herself ever (nowhere was safe for those kinds of thoughts), and especially not lately, but she just… she couldn't fucking shake it! And it wasn't because of the usual nosedive her stomach took under the weight of the guilt that crushed it every time she even tangentially allowed herself to think about that kid she once had been and the people who mourned her.

"Habibtyi?"

Sara turned her head towards Nyssa with a low hum of acknowledgment.

"You look troubled."

Sara scrunched up her nose.

"I'm uncomfortable." She rolled her shoulder as she said that - not a big fan of the one-shoulder thing either. "Let's just get this over with so I can get out of this thing."

From across the seat, Nyssa's dark eyes followed the line of the dress from shoulder to hip, to the high slit on her thigh with lowered lids, her lips curving ever so slightly up.

"Indeed, let's."

Sara felt her lips curl upwards, some of her unease receding as she raised her eyebrows very subtly at her lover, who winked before looking out the window again.

The car stopped in front of the ridiculous red carpet that had been rolled out. Sara drummed her fingers on the armrest as she waited for the driver to open her door.

"Patience is a virtue, my love." Nyssa said absentmindedly, eyes fixed on the building in front of the theater.

"So is efficiency."

When the door did open, the biting cold of Moscow's november air rushed in and Sara clutched the lapels of her fur coat closer around her throat with a scowl.

Fucking silk. Might as well be buck-ass nude.

She'd learned to like Moscow in the time she'd spent with Nyssa there, but never really managed to be indifferent to its bitter cold.

The girl that took her coat and checked her ticket once inside the doors of the theatre was a twenty something brunette, fresh-faced and pink cheeked - and she was staring. Sara turned her head slightly, met the girl's round dark eyes and winked, making her blush and look away, even as she tried to bite back a smile. No reason to leave people with fear when she could just as easily get the same result with something more pleasant.

She got through the heavy security check without a hitch, careful to kept her face angled just a little bit to the right, pretending to play with her hair and look at her watch, so that the cameras wouldn't get a clear shot of her face. The two very out of place big men at the foot of the stairs were impossible to miss. As they got busy staring at her legs as she walked by, Sara sized them up without them ever noticing. They were trying their hand at loitering, but Sara could tell just by their stance that they were military and they were clearly armed beneath their suits.

Even if Sara hadn't already known that the Russian Head of State was in attendance, the way his security detail was peppered throughout the theater looking distinctively GRU-trained would have told her.

But she did know, just as she knew that once she reached the third floor, she had to turn left into a side corridor and then step through a personnel-only door for which she had already been given the keycard. That door would lead her into a corridor that she had to walk to get backstage. Once she did that, Sara's knew she had to turn right and that five feet away from the door, she would find the false-handrails she had to pull on and then reassemble into a camouflaged sniper rifle. She put her gloves on before going that and threw the clutch in the nearest trashcan.

Sara went through the motions without a single hitch, certain of every movement. Had it been anyone else's strategy she was following after being pulled into a surprise mission with just two day's notice, she wouldn't be neither as calm nor as sure. But this wasn't just anyone.

The details of this mission had been laid out for her and Nyssa in the clear and plain way that Sara had recognised immediately, all possible scenarios already accounted for with almost-scientific precision, just like everything else Saeada ever did.

Gone too were the times when Sara used to wonder how she managed to do things like this.

Sara climbed one of the tower props backstage and once at the top, she faced east. The latticed sides would protect her cover while not hindering her visibility, and in that moment sara had more appreciation for theater than she'd ever had as a kid. Drama club hadn't exactly been her style, but every once in awhile, Laurel had insisted on dragging her along.

Sara took a deep breath, shook her hands.

Focus.

She could see most of the public and even a good bit of the stage from there. Calmly, Sara propped her foot up on one of the boards that protruded from the wooden tower's side, and set her elbow on her knee to brace for the shot. She found the Chancellor easily as she looked through the scope out into the public. The sheet of the opera's music that was open in front of her had a single high note centered in red.

That's when the shot would be taken.

A small movement in one of the third floor's booths caught her attention. It was almost imperceptible, but Sara knew the reflection off the scope of a sniper when she saw it.

There you are.

The other one was just behind her.

One shooter; one redundancy in case the first failed, plus insurance in the form of a bomb. They'd been through, at least.

The music rose and Sara put her finger on the trigger. This had to happen fast. And it had to happen now. Sara took a deep breath, aimed. One the exhale, she pulled the trigger. She barely watched the shadow at the other end of the theater collapse before she'd turned and aimed again. She was careful to aiming, so that the body wouldn't move in weird ways and drop off the narrow railing and land on the stage. She doubted that was the kind of drama all those nicely dressed people out there had paid for.

The bullet went straight through the mark's forehead and the strength of the shot shoved him backwards just a little. He landed on the railing, his foot hanging off.

Good enough.

She dismantled the rifle with quick movements, put the pieces and the gloves through the garbage chute as she walked by it and quietly slipped into the main corridors of the theater again. The high notes of the opera echoed as she passed, almost drowning out the clicking of her heels. She wished she could just chuck them off and run, but experience had taught her that the best way to avoid detection in any high-tension situation is to walk and never run.

Nyssa was already in the parking lot, leaning against one of the columns and looking casually stunning in her black three-piece suit as she waited for her.

"So how does this work, exactly?" Sara asked as she got closer to their designated car and drummed her fingers its dark hood. "Do we just take the body out and shove it into the Chancellor's supposedly secret escape vehicle?"

"Yes." Nyssa said simply.

"Cameras?"

"Already taken care of. New toys." She flipped her phone in her hand and then put it back in her pocket. But then an expression that could almost have been a pout came over her face. "She's making this so easy; it's no fun anymore."

Sara allowed herself a small smile at that. She knew what Nyssa meant all too well. But she also knew why Saeada went to such lengths to ensure that everything was always perfectly managed whenever Nyssa was forced to be part of missions that required the subtlety of infiltration in plain sight: Nyssa simply had no patience for it. In fact, Sara was sure, after years of training and fighting by her side, that the word subtle was not evenknown to her lover. And even if it was, it was scorned.

The Heir of the Demon had not been forged into the kind of creature that could tread this earth lightly.

Nyssa chucked the keys in Sara's direction, who snatched them in midair and opened the trunk of their car. She rolled her eyes when she saw the canary-yellow ribbon stuck on the forehead of the dead man.

It never seized to amaze her how someone who was so fucking grim and deadly, could be such a troll when mood struck her.

"I think that is a 'hello' meant for you, beloved." Nyssa chuckled as Sara snatched the idiotic thing away.

"Yeah, not quite so much." Sara flipped the ribbon and showed Nyssa the back it, where a small smiley face with tiny red horns smirked cheekily at her.

Nyssa snorted.

They put the body in the back seat of the Chancellor's car and set the timer of the bomb to three minutes.

They were out of there in two.

The rumble of the plane filtered through the co-pilot headset as a barely there buzz and Sara was grateful for that. She'd felt at home in the controls, and had flown a plane enough times to know that it was one of the things she enjoyed best, but even the open bright horizon in front of her couldn't put Sara at ease right now. She was sitting ramrod straight in her seat, the buzz of adrenaline still shivering in her veins.

It didn't really make sense. The ground mission had gone without a hitch, they had the perfect aircraft, they were ready. And yet she was on edge; shoved there by a charged restlessness that had been clawing at the inside of her ribcage ever since they broke Russian airspace two days ago. Longer than that really - ever since she and Nyssa got the call to be here. It didn't matter that there was no material explanation, Sara had learned to trust her instincts to keep her alive even when there wasn't even a shiver of air to prove them right. And right now she couldn't shake off the feeling that something unknown was exhaling it's cold breaths at the back of her necks and would reach out and snap it at any moment.

Sara deliberately rolled her shoulders and let them drop, feeling the ache of the tension that had accumulated there start to ease just a little bit. She told herself to steady her breathing, relax her spine. Try to find some kind of center again. She still had an extraction to complete and needed a clear head on her shoulders.

From the corner of her eye, she could see the profile of one of Al-Owal's fighters, where he sat beside her as first pilot. It had been fucking unfortunate that his was the closest team to serve as their backup. Sara had never liked The First and he generally seemed to be content ignoring her existence, but there had always been something about flatness of the man's dark eyes, like two bottomless pits, that made her wary of turning her back on him.

But then again, she felt that way about most people in the League lately. The problem was that she couldn't yet tell if it was her own paranoia affecting her or if she was just waking up.

Sara unbuckled herself from the co-pilot seat the first moment it was possible. On the back of the plane, Nyssa was already in full gear, oxygen mask hanging around her neck as she tightened the straps of jumping harness around her chest, hips and thighs.

Sara suited up in silence.

Ten minutes out of the extraction point and thirty thousand feet in the air, they are all ready and waiting.

"All systems are a go." Al-Owal said as he walked down to them. He seemed passed by them, but then he seemed to think better of it and stopped in front of Nyssa. "My liege, forgive me the repetition, but i must say it one last time: I would advise you stay in the aircraft."

"I appreciate your advice, but as i said, I shall not be following it."

"We do not know what awaits us." The First reiterated. "This may be a stealth aircraft, but their radar will pick us up movin above their flight trajectory."

The corner of Nyssa's mouth curled up to one side, black eyes flashing.

"I find it truly amusing that you think she hasn't tinkered with their radar already."

Al-Owal took a small step closer, not enough to get in Nyssa's space but enough to assert his conviction.

"The Spider's lot never go in with an extraction plan."

Nyssa signed. "There have always been exceptions, and you know this well, Al-Owal."

Her tone packed a careless dismissiveness. She was high on the thrill of the mission - they'd be jumping out of a plane and ambushing a Lockheed C130 Hercules in 5 minutes - but Sara wished Nyssa would pay a bit more attention. She had the bad habit of dismissing out of hand what she did not agree on.

"Five years with us, three in the field and never has she requested and extraction before, even upon the threat of death. And now she deviates from her mission, stops an assassination, lets those who ordered it go free and invites the Heir into a cargo plane transporting chemical weapons."

Nyssa's turned to look Al-Owal in the eye. She hadn't been moving before either, but this time her stillness had intent. Sara felt the icy trickle of dread slither up her spine, tingling all the way to the tips of her fingers. A part of her, the careful voice of cold reason, could see the point of what Al-Owal was saying. Insulting as it was to suggest that she keep out of the danger while sending her own people into it, Nyssa was the Heir to the Demon; she wasn't exactly replaceable.

But on the other hand, what Al-Owal was suggesting was treason… and if Nyssa so much as hinted at that doubt, her hesitation would spell terrifying consequences for Saeada.

"I have heard your theory before. I have rejected it before. This is is the second time you question my judgment." The glacial coldness in Nyssa's voice was implacable, the promise of erupting repercussions lying just beneath it. "There shall not be a third, Al-Owal."

Al-Owal's reaction was only a slight widening of his eyes, before he set his face into expressionlessness. He bowed his head, hand open over his heart, and retreated three steps before he turned his back on the Heir.

"We are in position!" One of the women warned, diffusing the remaining tension.

They all put the oxygen masks on just as the transporting ramp of the plane opened. The harsh wind lurched in so suddenly and with such pressure that Sara had to grab the railing hard and brace her feet so that she wouldn't be shoved backwards. All other worries took a secondary seat, as the rush of the here-and-now crackled in her veins.

Below them, Sara could see the carrier, huge and dangerously close.

At Nyssa's mark, Sara and three others jumped out of the plane through tethers, landing at the sides of the Lockheed C130 below them. The push of the wind and speed shoved them them towards the tail of the aircraft, where the transporting ramp of it was already opened, like a huge mouth in the belly of the plane, waiting to swallow them. They were shoved into it violently, but almost seamlessly. Sara landed on her hands and feet and rolled with the momentum a few times. Her shoulder took the worst of the hit, the whole left side of her body stinging so much that it made her eyes water for a moment. She managed to stop into a crouch however, hand immediately going for her staff as she took in the surrounding area through the googles.

A movement to her right made her jump to her feet but before she could do anything else, the man dressed in military fatigues lurched forward and then dropped to the ground like his strings had been cut.

Behind him stood a short girl in dark green camouflage. Instinctively Sara knew who it was, but for a moment she didn't recognize her friend at all beneath the bright red mop of hair and bleached white eyebrows. She looked like a ghost of someone whose eyes Sara might have seen once.

It had always been a wonder to Sara, how one person could ever manage to wear so many skins and then shed them like it was nothing, as snakes did every season.

Saeada signaled Sara and the others to hurry and then started tampering with the electronic panel on the side of the plane, while the rest of the Shadows spread out to do plant the explosives. The instructions had been very specific: this had to look like an accident.

As she worked, Sara kept an eye out for Saeada. Her steps were sure, her fingers quick and her face set in stone, impenetrable as she worked. At least that about her was familiar. She didn't falter even when she opened the black bag that Nyssa had brought down and pulled out of it the body of a girl the the same mop of fire-red hair, pale skin and white eyebrows. For a moment Sara felt sick, but she throttled it down and helped Saeada strap the body on the seat at the side of the plane.

She was burning bridges like never before, which meant that something had gone to shit in an unprecedented way.

But those were thoughts for later.

Sara gave Nyssa the thumbs up when they were done, looped the jumping harness across Saeada's hips and thighs and then clipped the tether to her own harness, strapping the two of them together securely just as Saeada wrapped her arms around Sara's torso. From this close, her paleness looked almost greyish and Sara could tell she had lost weight. Sara passed her a spare oxygen mask and a pair of gloves. Saeada wasn't dressed for an excursion at thirty thousand feet above the ground either, but it was nothing either of them hadn't survived before. For a moment, familiar deep-blue eyes met hers and in that look Sara found the first spark of something recognisable: a subtle shade of gratitude softening their hard surface.

They jumped out last, just as the ramp started closing. They swayed high in the sky, tethered to their own plane, before the cable started shortening, pulling them back into the aircraft. Sara tightened her arms around Saeada's torso and they twisted their legs together for stability. Once they were close to the edge, they both reached out for to grasp the extended arms and were pulled in.

Sara found her feet quickly and untangled the jumping harness so that Saeada could step away and warm herself. She almost fell on her hands and knees shivering, but both Nyssa and Sara reached for her and sat her down before her face met the floor.

As Saeada looked up at them over the harsh line of red bangs cut across the middle of her forehead, Sara finally found that she could breathe easier for the first time in two days.

Nyssa started laughing and clapped Saeada on the shoulder, just as a few miles ahead of them, the cargo plane's engines exploded into a fire and it started to nosedive for the surface of the Russian tundra.

Sara was sitting cross legged down on the plane's floor, waiting for Saeada to come out of the bathroom. She had prepared to see a different person, but she still couldn't quite make sense of the change. Gone were the military clothes, the messy red mop of hair. They'd been stuffed in a plastic bag like the gruesome remains of a scalped head and shedded skin. Now before her stood a League Shadow in all black, collar buttoned up all the way to her throat, loose pants shoved in black boots and long dark hair clipped back in a severe bun. Only the bleached eyebrows remained of the person Saeada had inhabited for two months, and a sickly paleness that hinted at too many days underground. Sara supposed there was nothing that could be done about those at the moment.

Her fingers were still tinted an angry red too, but the numbness must be starting to recede, because she was moving more gracefully, sitting down on the floor beside Sara almost without a single difficulty.

Sara pulled out the yellow ribbon from the inside pocket of her vest and raised one eyebrow in Saeada's direction.

"Cute."

Saeada's lips twitched. "I've always thought so."

"Your sense of humour turns morbid when you're bored."

"At least is still have one." She quipped as if nothing had happened.

Sara took a deep breath, thought about it for a moment and then decided she might as well ask.

"Why the fuck would you keep the body?"

Because honestly… she couldn't fathom what part of anyone's brain would keep someone's body in the freezer for… however long she'd kept it.

The nonchalance of Saeada's shrug as as natural as Sara's repulsion by the situation.

"I didn't know if i might need it, so i kept it. Stealing someone's identity can be tricky." She said it as if it was a logical explanation. "As it turned out, I did need it. Now they will never know they were infiltrated and neither will whoever payed them."

Sara felt her lips twist in a frown and was about to say 'cool motives, still gross' when she noticed Saeada wincing again. Sara eyed the other girl's left side suspiciously.

"Are you injured?"

"No more than you are." Was the vague response just as Nyssa sauntered towards them, the smirk on her face only highlighting just how pleased she was with everything.

"How was Moscow?" Saeada asked, effectively deviating Sara's attention.

Nyssa snorted. "Boring."

"Cold." Sara deadpanned. "From now on the only favours you'll be collecting from me better involve tropical countries."

That little twitch at the side of Saeada's mouth was as much of a smile she would allow herself here. Nyssa laughed though. The sound of it was was rare in public, but when it came, it was low and smoky, and it could dance up the back of Sara's neck as if it had been designed by nature to send shivers down her spine.

It wasn't enough though. Sara fucking hated the cold. It reminded her of endless floating days, baking in the sun and walking around in the woods her toes feeling both numb and rotting in too big shoes.

"I can't imagine two months wandering around in the Ural mountains was a walk in the part either." Nyssa said almost amiably as she looked down at them from where she was casually leaning against the side of the plane.

All the reaction she got from Saeada was a wordless shrug.

Sara had yet to hear Saeada complain about anything.

Nyssa sighs.

"Well, since your name-day[1] came and went and you were not there for it, I brought you something." She continued as she sat cross-legged in front of Felicity, mirroring her. She took out three small tin cups from her backpack and set them down with the kind of pageantry that was characteristic of her, and no less pronounced just because it felt misplaced in the back of a noisy and grimy cargo plane, with all three of them worse for wear.

"I was in Tel Aviv when you made contact." Nyssa explained, her eyes seeming to bind Saeada in place, as if there was a secret between them. "Brought you something you might like."

Already a smile was curling her Saeada's lips up, making her look more and more like herself. For a fraction of a moment, she and Nyssa were locked together in their silence and Sara felt the push of it like a true touch, shoving her outward and away from them.

But it was only a fleeting feeling.

The moment the cap of the thermos was unscrewed, the sharp minty scent of the Na'na tea filled the space between them. Sara watched Saeada close her eyes and inhale deeply, as if she couldn't help it. The look on her face was the closest thing Sara had seen to calm, the smallest measure of peace slipping in and settling on her. It was the familiar scent of home that calmed her; something Sara didn't have anymore. Something she could have envied, if she'd tried.

Something that Nyssa had spent two hours in Tel Aviv trying to find, without caring for who might rush in at her heels. She'd haggled with the shopkeeper for at least twenty minutes, because she wanted the tea made out of a very specific leaf that was Saeada's favorite.

It was fascinating to Sara, how someone like Nyssa whose very nature had been harnessed to be lethal the way a blade was forged for that very same purpose, could show such honest thoughtfulness for the people that managed to crawl close enough to her heart. It was strange, but Sara understood it perfectly. It had been the raging fire in the Demon's daughter that Sara had been amazed by, that she had reached for with both hands, needing to learn how to channel her own burning screams into action. But it had been the sincere and unexpected kindness beneath it, that she had fallen in love with.

She loved the woman who had been raised to always win, and yet had been able to see beyond Sara's cracks and skinny bones. The same woman that had never once tried to protect her, but rather put a weapon in her hand and taught her to protect herself. A fierce sort of love, reckless and trusting.

It was that same kind of aggressive affection that Saeada responded to, though subtly as ever. It was, if one were to be honest, one of the very few things she ever responded to.

Sara watched Saeada take the small cup carefully from Nyssa's longs fingers, taking care not make contact with Nyssa's skin at any point.

"Toda, Gvirti[2]." Saeada's voice rarely changed inflection to express any kind of emotion, unless it was blistering vindictiveness, but when she said those words, the gratitude was warm in them and they were spoken in such a way that, on her, it might have been called soft. (if ever she allowed softness in herself, it always had to be spoken in Hebrew, like a secret and a bold statement at the same time. It was a truth that only Sara and Nyssa were privy to.)

They drank the warm tea in silence and waited for who will be willing to break it.

All three of them knew the answer to that will be Nyssa.

"What happened?"

Saeada turned the cup in her hand twice before she looked up, eyes shiny with deep-seated satisfaction that almost made her voice sound unsteady when she answered.

"I found them. And this time, I can prove it."

* * *

[1] This is a word i have borrowed from Game of Thrones/A song of Ice and Fire. There it literally means birthday but here, it means the day that the League Warrior chose their name, and therefore the day they were born as a league Shadow.

[2] 'Thank you, my lady' In Hebrew

* * *

Notes:

Sara Lance Theme: The Canary at the Opera - NiN, The Mark Has Been Made  
Extraction Theme: 30.000 feet up - Hans Zimer, Gotham's Reckoning, Dark Knight Rises OST


	3. a thousand eyes in the dark

**a thousand eyes in the dark**

* * *

 _It does me no good; violence has changed me._  
 _My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;_  
 _now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,_  
 _with the sense it is being tested_

 _Louise Glück, from "October"_

* * *

Unless she was in the middle of a heated fight, Sara had never seen Saeada[1] look as animated as she did explaining the development of her mission. Her voice was as steady as ever but her eyes were shining and she was leaning forward just a bit as she spoke, even moved her hands every once in awhile, pointing at the different pictures on her tablet.

"Six months ago, Al-Eankabut[2] and I were in Berlin. We spotted _this_ man the same day a car accident killed the visiting President of Malawi." Saeada shows Nyssa the picture of a mid-twenties, sporting dark eyes and a military haircut cut.

"He is former MI6, presumed dead. We followed him in Jakarta, and managed to tag him and his team, hours before a passenger plane vanished over the Pacific with 236 passengers. They led me, a month later, to the Philippines, right before a fired petrochemical plant gassed a village of two hundred people[3]."

Sara's frown got more pronounced. "Are you saying there is a pattern to this?"

"These are no random acts of mayhem. There is a system behind them, a reason. That missing plane was carrying the Secretary of the World Bank. The fire corrupted a global arms cooperation. The wreck triggered a civil war. I have collected the faces of at least 36 intelligence officers that were presumed dead and the majority of them pop up around the time these 'accidents' happen."

She leaned backwards, rolled her shoulders and rubbed the back of her neck, to ease the aching of it, probably. Sara would offer to give her a massage, but the only kind of touch Saeada would allow in a place where anyone could walk in was the violent kind.

"I was in Cairo when I caught whispers of a hit on Austria's Chancellor. A couple of the names on my list popped up, so I followed the lead and it took me to Moscow. The cell I infiltrated was made up of mostly of Markovian separatists, with ties to various extremists groups in eastern Europe."

Saeada sighs, takes a deep breath before she continues… and Sara wonders what it would take to earn the trust of people who are generally paranoid by default; how much of oneself you'd have to give for it and how much would be a lie. What kind of lie it would be if you have to live with them in a common purpose for months… and then betray them, get them killed. Blow their plane up en route with them still alive in it.

Sara flinches away from that line of thought, because the very idea feels like it empties her of what little warmth she has left.

"They had neither the access nor the ability to execute that kind of hit. Someone else set it up for them, prepped them to take the blame and they didn't even realize it. It was all a set-up. I had one of the League Shadows run interference with the source, to find a way to tag whoever it was that gave the order. And that's when I met _him_."

The picture of a middle-aged white man filled the screen. His eyes were ice blue and what was left of his hair was blonde. The most striking thing about him was the self-satisfied smirk and the way he seemed to stand, like he was walking on his fingertips, always ready to spring into action.

"They call him Damian Darhk, but I assume that is an alias." She paused, called up various surveillance pictures of the same man. "I was close to breaching his network when someone, somewhere made a mistake. Darhk found out that there had been an breach in the Moscow cell whose mission he was there to see through."

"So you called for aid, like a child, instead of facing your own failure."

Sara turned her head to the side so fast that she almost gave herself whiplash. She'd been so immersed in Saeada's account that she had not noticed Al-Owal was standing at the mouth of the cockpit, half-hidden by the shadows. His lips were stretched in a sneer that was as mocking as it dared to be, with the Heir sitting twenty feet away from him.

Saeada looked at him long and unblinking, before she tuned to Nyssa again; more dismissive in that one glance than he had tried to be every time they came across one another.

"Whoever Darhk represents may know there had been an infiltration, but they will never know by whom. I planted false intelligence, got the CIA involved just enough to make it look it was them. The interference had to be run fast and it had to be somewhat careless. The CIA has a way of… blotching up things."

Nyssa's smile was slow, understanding deepening her attention. "A successfully stopped assassination, but with a bomb still going off."

Saeada nodded, the compliment implicit in Nyssa's voice barely acknowledged, as they both liked it. "In the ruins of the plane they will find all nine bodies that boarded it, with nothing stolen and a Black Box that will tell them a gas leak caused a spark and the engines exploded. The element of surprise is still intact and so is the League secret."

"That does not change the fact that your incompetence jeopardized it."

That was twice Al-Owal had interrupted. He was past irritation and being purposefully insulting now. It wasn't really about Saeada in particular, though Sara swore sometimes it felt that way.

It was no secret that Al-Owal didn't like the Spider, her Initiates, what they did and how they did it. Many of the League felt the same. Part of the problem, or at least the part that kept it from resolving, was that Saeada didn't really… _argue_ her position, not with anyone. She didn't see a point. She listened till they were done and then went ahead to did whatever she was going to do, exactly as she had been trained to do it.

Which was why it was a wonder to hear her talking back now.

"Why did your men kill the agents I send you to interrogate and recruit in Vyborg?" She asked evenly after a long moment of quiet.

Al-Owal snorted. "They were worthless. Had nothing more to give."

Saeada's voice turned softer, her eyes unblinking. "Nevertheless, killing them was never part of your orders."

"I do not take orders from _you_."

"True. But it was _my_ mission you were interfering with, and whose parameters you did not respect." She tipped her pointy chin up, dark eyes steady as she spoke. "The men you killed were part of my cover. They supposed to act as a decoy in case anyone would ever find out that there was a twenty-four hour gap between when Sasha Aliyev crossed the border and when she joined the Moscow cell.

"The League's secret may have been endangered, Al-Owal, but it was certainly not through any fault of mine."

And this was why Sara thought Saeada was not merely good at hiding emotions, but instead seemed completely detached from them: she was as far removed from satisfaction as she was from anger or defensiveness.

"I judged them useless and therefore dispatched them, as if she League's way with cowards." The First insisted, irritation bleeding into his voice. "If you truly were as good as you claim, _Al-Eaqarab **[4]**_ , a minor inconvenience like this would not have meant so much."

He spat out her League name out like it was an insult, and according to many it was, but Saeada didn't even breathe differently. Sara could see her fingers digging into her thigh, where they were hidden from Nyssa and Al-Owal's eyes, but despite that, her tone remained conversational.

"Death may be your gift Al-Owal, but information is mine. I do not require you to understand it, merely to adapt to it when need arises… as it is the League's way."

His mouth twisted into a snarl before he opened it, but one word from Nyssa was enough to stop him.

"Enough!" She said harshly. "Leave us."

The moment he did, Saeada went back to her tablet, calling up on the screen a few images of what looked like a power plant in the middle of the desert and turned the tablet around so that Nyssa could see them.

"There is a facility in Morocco that serves as a data vault to a german company named 'Entstehung[5]'. Fifteen out of the thirty-five calls received by the cell in Moscow were rerouted from there to halfway across the world. I think it's safe to say that this facility also serves as a sort of operational center and there will certainly be information stored there that will help us know about whatever it is that is going on. The best time to infiltrate it will be the weapons test they have scheduled two weeks from now."

Nyssa considered this for long minutes.

"My father needs to hear this." She finally said. And then, after a moment. " _You_ need to tell him."

Nyssa's words gave Saeada visible pause. For the first time since she had boarded the plane, she looked ill at ease.

"I would rather report back to my mentor, as usual."

Nysa waved her hand dismissively. "Then do that. And tell the Spider that the Heir wants you present as well, when the council gathers tonight."

Sara couldn't help the surprise that washed over her face when she looked at Nyssa. That was… not at all usual and despite what Nyssa liked to think, the League was not as open as she might like to unorthodoxy. Despite Saeada's impeccable - and so far, unprecedented - record of service, she was still an Initiate who still had a mentor. Showing up in the in a Council session would be seen as an insult and a grasp for her mistress' title.

To say that Nyssa was shoving Saeada in a difficult position would be putting it mildly. She was putting _herself_ in a tricky situation too.

"My mentor represents me. I do not have permission to even ask her to be there." Saeada stated that with the same flatness that she had spoke everything else up until now. It was impossible to tell how she felt about it or whether she even felt anything.

Nyssa punctuated her smirk with a single raised eyebrow.

"You do now."

The torches mounted on the walls of Nanda Parbat flickered low, their wane light never seeming to touch the ceiling, making it look like it was an endless height looming above. Sara remembered a time when she used to fear how the dancing firelight made every surface feel unsteady, as if there was always something moving just outside the corner of her eye. Even now, walking those halls made her skin crawl with awareness. The knowledge that it was probably done intentionally, just for that purpose, did not seem to dull its effect. Still, Sara kept walking.

She was not an officer, nor close to being one, so she didn't know what had happened behind the closed doors of the council. Whatever the Officers deigned to tell the rest of the League would be heard tonight, at the gathering. But Sara _did_ know, just by Saeada's account of things on the plane and how Al-Owal had not denied them, that some form of punishment would be handed out to him tonight. Knowing Ra's, it would be… creative.

She didn't know what Nyssa had been doing either, coming to Saeada's side so strongly and using her pull as Heir to bend the rules and get her to step into the council. The League was no stranger to power games and Nyssa navigated them with the same fierce pleasure she wielded a sword, but Sara couldn't see through this one. Showing such clear favoritism might put Saeada as first in line when it came to inheriting her mentor's Name, but in the mean time, it would do Nyssa no favors to associate herself too closely with one of the Spider's initiates. It would give others grounds to question her judgment, same as Al-Owal had done.

But then Sara stepped into the main hall and she saw Saeada sitting at her usual spot, looking even more isolated than usual, and she had to hold back a sigh.

Of _course_ the consequences wouldn't reverberate on Nyssa. Not directly. Nobody would ever dare challenge her face to face on something like this: she was too strong in herself and in Ra's favor, and her followers were loyal to her as if she were their god.

But Saeada was a different story.

A familiar, righteous kind of anger directed Sara's steps all the way to Saeada's side. She sat down quietly and started arranging her meal without a word.

"You shouldn't sit here tonight." Saeada said in a whisper so quiet it was almost indistinguishable from the crackle of the torches nearby.

"I find myself very comfortable, thank you."

Saeada's eyes pressed against the side of Sara's head like a touch, but she kept pretending to be wholly engrossed by the food. Eventually Saeada turned away.

"As you wish."

Sara bit back a smile. She knew for a fact that a more pliable character would not have helped Saeada at all: it was the nature of her _service_ to the League that made her and those like her so distasteful for the more conservative of its members. But still, there was a fascinating kind of defiance in the way Saeada refused to make herself into anything other than what she was, not even for the sake of carving an easier life for herself.

It was exactly her kind of stupid and Sara admired it. She wondered sometimes if it was part of Saeada's training, the way it had been part of Sara's: that stubborn willingness to make things even harder for oneself, just to overcome one's limits.

"Are they going to punish al-Owal?" Sara asked, as if she was just picking up the conversation where they had left off.

"He has been already punished. Twelve bites of a nine-tailed whip on his back."

Sara's frown only got more pronounced. "I thought those kinds of things happened where everyone could see them."

A sharp look from Saeada was all it took to remind Sara to mind the bite of her words when she talked about this out in the open.

"My mentor felt that it would benefit neither him nor myself, if that were to happen."

Sara hid her huff in her wooden cup. As if the Spider ever did anything for anyone's benefit - even if it was one of her own. That was not the way that woman operated. But still, Sara had to begrudgingly admit that Al' Eankabut[6] might have had a point there. A high officer being punished for fucking up a mission, on behalf of one of the Spider's initiates? Yeah, that probably wouldn't have made Saeada any more popular than she was.

It was somewhat of a paradox, the distaste most had for the Spider and those like her. More than once Sara had thought it was because many did not seem to fully understand what they did, but she knew in her heart that there was more to it.

Every league Shadow was trained to be a knife in the dark, but they were supposed to be bound together by the code they all followed. ' _Kill one, save a thousand **[7]**_ '. It was their purpose, what was supposed to keep them all from being more than mere butchers. An insurmountable bond to an ideal of _protection_ that filled you with purpose.

For the longest time Sara had believed in that. She had channeled all her rage and darkness into making something of herself that might one day protect someone else, even broken as she was. She had wanted to be that person. Truthfully, she didn't think she could be anything better anymore. The thought that she was doing the best she could the only way she knew how was often the only thought that made the blood on her hands more bearable. ( _once… twice… how many times? How many was too many?_ )

But the Spiders were different.

They existed so that the League could exist, scouts of deep cover, infiltrators, planners. They were the red dot of the sniper's aim, preceding the surgical shot of the League's bullet.

But to be able to be anyone and belong anywhere, they first had to belong nowhere.

They believed in nothing. They answered to no one.[8]

No one but Ra's al Ghul, that is.

It was what they needed to be, but it kept them apart from the other members in a way that could not be explained, only felt.

Sara turned her head just barely, watched Saeada's hands and the way she ate with chopsticks, like she'd been born holding them. She had small hands, fine boned and pale. Sara knew those hands could be as lethal as her own. She'd seen them sow destruction with the terrifying ease of a game, moving too quickly to track over a keyboard. There were things Saeada did that Sara would never be able to understand, but apart from Nyssa, she was the closest thing to a friend Sara would ever have in the League. And it was not because she had saved Sara's life more than once and Sara had returned it almost as many times. They were bound together by more than just the League's way.

They had shared a life once, when they both used to answer to different names; when they had been just girls and not weapons of war. This secret they shared bound them stronger than all the others. Sometimes in ugly, detestable ways, reminding them both of things they'd rather forget, but Sara wouldn't change it for the world. And though not always vocal, these feelings reached deep into them both. In many ways, Saeada was part of her, as Sara felt that she was part of Saeada too.

But there were things… unexplainable things in the other woman that left Sara feeling cold. Whatever had made Saeada into the creature she was today had left an absence in her, a foreignness that Sara could never really account for.

It was hard to trust someone who was built to deceive, no matter who that person was. As it was hard to set aside the mistrust drilled into Sara through pain and see the person that still took shallow little breaths beneath the weapon. Saeada may be her friend and perhaps there was still some part of her that answered to her old discarded name… but she was the _League_ first and foremost. So deep into it that there seemed to be no difference sometimes between her and the shadows.

And Sara didn't trust that. She couldn't.

The double doors at the end of the hall swung open, and maybe it was because of the thoughts that had been swirling in her head, but Sara startled. She didn't need to turn to see who had walked in.

In unison with the others, she stood and turned to face Ra's al Ghul.

His robes were the usual simple black, his only ornaments the Demon's ring and the sword that never left his side. The flickering light made his deep-set eyes appear even darker. It had always amazed Sara that this man who could inspire in her such overwhelming terror, had any part in the making of the woman who had reminded Sara of what it felt like to be touched with tenderness, even here, among shadows.

Nyssa bore indelible traces of her father: in the way she walked into a room and she did not become the center of it, but the room itself. There were remnants of him in Nyssa's technique when she fought; in how she was deadly the same way hunters were - because it was part of her nature. He was in the calmness of her overpowering confidence, in her black hair and in the dark tone of her skin. Her lover had the Demon's eyes.

They had never seemed as void on her face, though. Nyssa's passion could bring the sun to its knees and it burned bright in everything she did.

Sara felt her heart thud hard against her breastbone when the Demon stopped right in front of her. It wasn't Sara he was looking at though.

"You did well, child. Nanda Parbat welcomes you."

Saeada bowed her head in thanks.

"Thank you." Her voice always got imperceptibly lower when she spoke to the Demon. "It is good to be home."

"Will you be sorry to leave it again so soon? There could be found someone else to go in your stead."

Sara had never known Ra's to take anyone's opinion on any of their dispatchments, but she wasn't about to question it.

Apparently, neither was Saeada.

"My life is my service." She said simply. She did not need to shout - the strength of her conviction thrived in the calm she spoke it with.

Ra's nodded. "As it should be."

He moved on beyond them then, and once he was seated, the others sat down too. The buzz of ongoing conversation was not as free as before, but it regained momentum slowly nevertheless. Sara waited for it to grow before she spoke.

"You're leaving for Morocco so soon?"

"I'm not going to Morocco."

Sara frowned. "Then where are you going that needs you to leave not even 28 hours after you got back to base?"

But Saeada only reached for another slice of bread, whispering 'later' as she did so.

Later turned out to be hours after, and deep in the maze of corridors that would lead Sara to the part of the old fortress that Saeada liked to dwell in.

Voices interrupted her way there though, and she shifted back against the wall until she was swallowed by the flickering shadows If an old alcove.

"He was not alone. There were many of us that felt our faith slip tonight, when the Heir made her choice, is that not right, Namurr[9]?"

Sara did not know who Namurr was, but she did recognize the voice of the one who was speaking. It was one of Al-Owal's men. She'd heard him called Storm, but she did not know why, and did not know him. She could not see their faces either, but she did see who they were talking to.

Saeada was leaning against the wall three feet away from them, hands in her pockets staring at the torch's dance at it burned, without ever acknowledging the two men trying to get a rise out of her.

They'd found her here unmoving because she'd been waiting for Sara.

"Rather disappointing for us too really. If the Heir wanted a pretty bird on her shoulder, she might as well have chosen Taer al Safer."

Sara felt her face grow hot at the same time as a cold trickle reached her hand and gathered them into hard fists.

 _You little fuck…_

But before Sara could move, Saeada spoke, her voice so low it almost seemed to come from the shadows without ever disturbing them.

"That's funny." And it was, though Sara could not detect a single trace of amusement in that deadpan tone. The hilarity was in the fact that the ' _pretty bird_ ' they were talking about could snap both their necks… and Saeada knew it. "I'll tell her you said that."

The threat was as stark as the hiss of a hot iron dipped in water.

Who she was referring to, she didn't say. The curl of her lips made it clear enough that neither option was any safer than the other.

The two men left - passed right by where Sara was hiding without noticing her. Sara held her breath and did not step out until the echo of their steps had faded.

"Come on." Saeada called, utterly unsurprised to see her stepping out of the dark alcove.

Sara felt somewhat safer only once the head door of Saeada's room closed behind her.

"What is going on?"

"Nyssa chose me as her second in command for the mission in Morocco." Saeada said as she moved around her room and sat heavily on her bed.

"So you _are_ going?"

"No. Ra's needs me elsewhere."

Sara huffed. "Clever way of _not_ saying he doesn't want you rising too quickly."

She took a seat on the small uncomfortable sofa facing the bed so that she could look at Saeada in the face as they spoke. Later she would wonder if the other girl had purposefully waited for Sara to be off her feet before giving a true answer.

"The Starling City Vigilante has caught his interest. He wants me to chase him down, root him out. Learn him. See if the League would benefit from him."

The name of her hometown spoken so casually would have been enough to rock Sara to her heels in a good day… and today hadn't been particularly good.

She focused on the details.

"There is a vigilante in Starling?"

Saeada tilted her head a bit to the side, the way she did when her interest was piqued and she allowed herself to show it.

"You don't know."

It wasn't a question, merely an observation. Sara wished Saeada would stop fucking around and tell her straight up what she thought she was observing.

Instead she gave Saeada a her best unimpressed look.

"I was wrapping up a deep-cover op in Syria. Nobody over there gives a shit about local news from a random city in the US."

Sara was riding this very well, considering. Yes, she was… If you didn't count the fact that the moment the door had closed behind her, she had slipped from Arabic to English without even realizing, as if it had been on the tip of her tongue for months and now it just poured out.

Sara let it.

But she still couldn't understand the carefulness of Saeada's eyes on her.

"He is an expert archer." Saeada explained. "Good enough to catch Ra's attention. Has been active since October, targeting mainly one-percenters. He wears a mask over his mouth …and a green hood to cover his identity."

It's strange… how shock can bring a time to a halt and stretch it slow, like honey pulled out of a jar. Sara felt frozen, unaware of anything but the way her thoughts kept crackling in her head like the attacking flock of a thousand chirping birds. Something that had been frozen for years deep inside her condensed, the chill bubbling up all the way to the surface of her skin, covering her in cold sweat.

After the second careful breath that reminded her she had lungs, Sara met Saeada's dark eyes - and found expectancy waiting beneath the inch-deep placidity of her expression.

The first thread of anger brushed against her, like a ghost touch at the back of her neck. Sara grabbed it with both hands. Anger was steadier ground than… than whatever else was shifting the tectonic plates of her being at the moment.

She'd never hated more Saeada's ability to drop bombshells with the same dry-as-dust tone she used to report the weather and murder both.

"You told me he'd died in Hong Kong." _You liar!_

Sara barely recognized her own voice, it was so heavy with emotion. She didn't give a fuck though.

"I told you all traces of him ended there." Saeada corrected. "Sealed ARGUS files had listed him as KIA. I assumed that to be true when I found no indication of it being otherwise."

Sara's fingers ached from how hard she was gripping the wooden armrest of the couch.

"If…" She swallowed, tried again. "If _he's_ alive, Shado could be too."

She hated how transparent the fragile hope was in her voice, but she couldn't help it. It's feathers were practically clogging her throat, she could either spit it out or choke on it. It was astounding, that even so far into numbing blackness, Sara could still surprise herself into overwhelming emotion.

She looked away, studying her fingernails so that she could hide whatever her eyes showed of her insides.

What did she know of feelings anyway? Her own came and went as they pleased.

Saeada's voice was the closest thing to gentle she was probably capable of. "Maybe. I don't know."

Sara looked up, meeting that blank face, those expressionless eyes.

Saeada's unspoken ' _yet_ ' was soft, but obvious. If proof existed, she could usually find it. Whatever Ra's truly wanted her to peel out of Oliver, Saeada would get to it. Many thought her greatest gift was her intellect, but they hadn't seen her at work the way Sara had: Saeada's greatest talent was getting under people's skin.

Would she tell her, Sara wondered, if she found out Shado really was alive?

It was a simple enough question, but Sara couldn't ask it. Because the way Saeada was sitting there looking calm and even as ever, made the words stick at the roof of Sara's mouth. The astonishing amount of emotional detachment Saeada was capable of was repelling… and so fucking _provoking_ in that moment that Sara's hands itched to grab and shake her.

And there it was, the bare-boned truth of that transparent screen between them: Sara could never share destructive thoughts with someone whose eyes could be so empty.

"You're angry with me."

Sara didn't have to think about it. "No, I'm not angry with you."

"But you _are_ angry. Are you afraid I'm going to kill him?"

Sara manages to holds the steel ( _the threat_ ) back from her voice, but she can't quite keep it off her eyes.

"Those are not your orders." She said carefully.

"No, they're not. So what is it?"

The simplicity of that reiteration only fueled Sara's irritation. She sighed. "I don't know. I don't know what I'm feeling."

Anger was there, simmering beneath that mire of freshly released emotions.

"I think I'm relieved." And as she said it, Sara realized it was true. Realization washed over, starting warm at the tips of her fingers and beating a path all the way up to her chest.

Oliver was alive. He was _alive_!

He was the moron going around a his city putting arrows in rich people, but he was alive.

What the fuck was he doing anyway?

Why the hell did Ra's care?

This time, when Sara looked up ready to ask another question, she felt a lot steadier.

"Aren't you a bit overqualified for chasing Oliver Queen around Starling?"

Saeada shrugged. "I am whatever they want me to be."

The words hit Sara like a brick to the face.

The passivity behind them was so incongruous with the girl Sara knew, it was as if someone else had spoken them. The girl who had survived a storm and the blistering desert, who had survived the League's brutal training and thrived. That girl had been willing to dare the dark to eat her fiercely and then snarled in the face of it, biting back harder. If Saeada hadn't been that girl, she wouldn't be alive today. But the passive acceptance of service was part of who _Al-Eaqarab_ had been forged to be.

The Scorpion… what the girl became after the trial she went through tore away at too many pieces. Something of the human remained, same as something of the old Sara had remained in who she was today. But what was left wasn't Sara anymore.

 _Taer-al-Safer_ was left. A few pieces of meat and sharp bones.

They were not the same.

Neither of them had been afraid of the dark. Or what waited for them there. But sometimes... sometimes Sara wished they had been.

For a split moment Sara honestly pondered the idea of warning Oliver. The thought was so loud in her mind that for a moment she expected it to ring all across the room. Whatever he had faced and apparently survived before( _survived_!), this was _the League_ coming for him now. He deserved to be warned!

But… _but_ , there was always a catch.

To warn him would mean to reveal herself to him, and Sara realized with a growing sense of dread that she couldn't do that. For a thousand different reasons, the most noble of them being that she didn't know how long she would even be alive for and she'd died in front of him twice - she couldn't put him through that again. There was shame there too: how could she ever reveal who she was now, when Oliver had been willing to kill someone himself, just so that she wouldn't ever have to know the sticky feel of blood on her hands. She was selfish enough not to want to see that disappointment on Oliver's face. Not from anyone who had known her as she once was and would despise who she was now.

Sara sighed and got up, moved towards the door without a word. When her hand brushed the lock, she stopped and turned her head.

"When are you leaving?"

"At dawn."

Of course she was.

Sara nodded. "Good luck." She closed the door behind herself without a sound.

She was selfish. She was the Canary.

* * *

[1] Im sorry for not pointing this out sooner – Saeada is the literal translation from English to Arabit of the word 'Felicity'. It's what Nyssa and Sara call her, in this fic, but not her 'League name' – that will be revealed later. Still, she can't use her real name anymore.

[2] The Spider, in Arabic, according to google translator

[3] This is lifted almost word for word from 'Rogue Nation' (mission impossible 5) because im lazy. I have no better excuse, im sorry.

[4] Translated from Arabic, meaning 'Scorpion'. The scorpion represents in certain parts of the world, evil and goodness both, and an others it is symbol of treachery and faithlessness.

[5] It means Genesis in German, according to Google Translate

[6] It means 'the spider' in Arabic, according to google translator.

[7] Taken from the movie 'Wanted' where the cove of assassins held themselves to this same belief.

[8] A nod to 'Return of the King here' Aragorn says this in the movie, about the men of the mountain.

[9] I dont even remember what this one means, im so sorry. It's not important anyway, you won't see him again.

* * *

League of Assassins Theme: 'Spiders' , Dark Magic Music - Salem's Secret

League of Assassins Theme: 'What we were made into' , Jen Titus - Oh' Death


	4. all predators far and near

'Muse of Fire', aired on November 28th 2012 (just to keep a kind of timeline clear). I don't know how closely I'll follow canon timeline, mostly because I'm not sure I understand if how time flows in Arrow, but I will try to keep things clear for you guys when you read.

ps: Felicity will change identities a couple of times here in the beginning, and if it gents confusing I apologize, but don't worry about it because none of those names really matter since they won't be mentioned beyond this chapter.

* * *

 _"They say that you remind_  
 _them of a deathbed,_  
 _a graveyard._

 _Dead girl, they call you._  
 _The grim reaper._  
 _The one who knows where the_  
 _bodies are buried but can't_  
 _say why."_

Caitlyn Siehl, 'Living Girl'

She got to as far as inside Pakistan's borders by her own means, undetected. In Lahore, Aisha Hadad and her husband boarded the Samjhauta Express. He lost himself five minutes after they got off the train in Delhi, when Aisha Hadad went into the women's bathroom in her niqab and Beatrice Walsh, a British student backpacking through Asia, came out of it.

Beatrice Walsh wore her light blonde hair in a short bob, hid half her face behind huge glasses and her body under a colorful maxi-skirt and a loose blue T-shirt, cropped short. She smiled too much, words streaming out of her mouth too fast and in a rounded, posh accent, and spoke carelessly of henna and yoga and the temples she'd seen. She kept two maps in the outside pocket of her backpack and one always in her hands, along with her phone.

Beatrice train-hopped as far as Mumbai mostly without accident ( though the person living beneath her had to spike the drink of one particularly insistent American man trying to get under Beatrice's skirt ) and in Jawaharlal Nehru Port, she boarded a cruising ship for Singapore. There, a Finnish cargo ship with a mostly-Russian crew was set to cross the Pacific for America and waited for one Irene Nesser - an extra passenger that was to be treated with extreme discretion.

Irene Nesser was a quiet Russian girl with straight dark hair, dressed in nondescript clothes of forgettable colors and she boarded the ' 30 Let Pobedy ', on October 12th at 04.13 am, once everyone else was on. There was nothing in Irene Nesser's life that might suggest she'd know how to infiltrate one of the most secure ports of the world and evade all security checks, but once aboard the ship, none of the crew aware of their extra passenger cared to ask her how she'd done it. Nyssa's Russian contacts tended to pay off, and because of Nyssa herself and her reputation, they did so remarkably without questions.

Irene Nesser ate rarely in the common area, mostly when it was empty of the other travelers. She was polite whenever anyone encountered her, but kept to herself and was so utterly unremarkable that whoever spoke to her, forgot about her five minutes after she was out of sight.

Mostly, Irene Nesser spent the duration of the twelve-day journey in her little cabin, two decks below the bridge, where she could get rid of the contacts and the wig, and go over her preliminary research.

She started with the layout of the city and spent the first three days reacquainting herself with Starling's spatial and urban structure. She relearned its network, important nodes of public transportations; the streets, subway and train stations; current social and economic development, with a particular interest to the city's underground structure and power grids. Almost immediately she decided that her first stop would be the Glades. Nowhere better to establish a preliminary base than in a place where people use their eyes for not seeing and their ears for not hearing.

( The thought of using a League safehouse never even crossed her mind. )

It took her two hours to find a small apartment to rent. She emailed its landlady through a secure account that was supported by a grid originating from Seattle.

Next was the target.

She spent the rest of her journey going through every bit of material she could get her hands on from public sources. Oliver Queen, his family and everything and everyone connected to them. It was quite a list. Process of elimination cut it down to fifty names worthy of interest. Hacking for more than just superficial information while en route was out of the question, so she chose to build a careful entry strategy instead, based on what she already knew.

Surveillance would have to come first. She listed the targets in order of both sensitivity and information-pool they would offer. Unsurprisingly to anyone but her, Moira Queen's assistant was first on the list. Second was her accountant.

She'd gone through all of this before, it was nothing new. But being on the open sea added a familiar layer of nerves beneath her skin, and a neurotic shade to her every action. She cleaned the cabin from top to bottom every day, even though she wore gloves the whole time she was there and kept her hair tightly braided against her head. She had nightmares almost every time she dared go to sleep, woke up drenched in sweat and angry at herself.

It had been some time since she'd dreamt of storms.

She buried the thoughts down under relentless reading on anything she got her hands on in relation to her assignment. When public resources ran out and she had already memorized every map of Starling she could need, she went back to perfecting her existing programs and laying the bases for a couple of new ones. At night before she slept, she methodically made herself read at least one chapter of mathematical theory or spherical astronomy, just so she could get her brain to focus on the furthest thing from being on a boat at sea again.

By the time the eastern coast of the United States got close enough to spy it on the horizon, she hadn't touched the bed in four days – preferring to catch whatever rest she might find on a pallet on the corner of the cabin.

It wasn't a conscious choice, not really, to get out on deck when the announcement was made that they were approaching shore. She had put Irene Nesser back on, because she needed to be ready to disembark and to do that, she had to meet with certain members of the crew. After, she was supposed to go back to her cabin, but instead she walked outside, planted her feet by the metal railing of the ship, right at the helm and watched Starling City's skyline twinkle against the night sky, growing ever wider and brighter.

Even wrapped as she was in a warm peacoat, winter boots and thick shawl around her neck and head, she could still feel the sting of the harsh cold wind beating against her body. It was making a dull throb come alive behind her forehead, the cold stiffening the back of her neck and shoulders. The discomfort barely even registered. It should have: she was wearing Irene Nesser still, but at this point, she wasn't doing it very well. It was not Irene staring out at the fast approaching city.

She looked inwards for some kind of feeling, a reaction, but everything inside her was as silent as a wide cathedral. Not even a small stone had dropped. There were no echoes. The specs of dust twinkling in the air, the only remains of what might have been a feeling once, did not make a sound.

She blinked, and Irene hunched against the cold and shivered as she pulled her coat tighter around her body. A moment later she turned her back to the approaching shoreline and walked away.

She waited for hours for everyone to disembark. By the time 04.00 am came, she might have jumped overboard in her haste to leave the ship, hadn't she been as weary of water as most cats were. She didn't of course. When the time was right and everything was silent, she simply heaved her military compression sack over her shoulder and slithered off the boat at the dead of night, with the smallest breath of relief to finally be on firm ground again.

She'd never be at ease – or as close to that as she could get – in the open water.

As she walked through the darkest corners of Starling City docks, a strange thought brushed by the back of her neck, like a feather. The memory of a girl, years ago, and how she had walked so close to where her ghost was walking now. How back then it had been midday and that girl had been getting on a different boat.

The thought was careless, spontaneously growing in her head like a vine. A stubborn green and alive thing bursting through concrete, defiantly blooming.

She buried that vine to its roots, again, and walked faster. She had nothing against its existence, of course. It was simply inconvenient at that time.

The apartment she'd chosen was part of a rundown complex south of the Glades. She paid the landlady when she got there, in cash. Behind the thirty-something woman's legs, a little girl, perhaps six or seven years old, dark hair in messy pigtails, looked at the stranger from beneath her lashes. A shy child's look, she noted with detachment. But then she caught sight of her eyes, and they told a different story: no, not shy. Cautious.

She left the mother and daughter with a very quiet, and rather stilted, ' have a nice day '.

She almost forgot to say it at all and probably would have left without a word if the woman had not wished her so first. It might sound strange with all the weird shit she did that was part of her duties, but relearning the social convention of conversation after months of isolation had always been the hardest part for her.

She turned the key of the cracked wooden door and then kicked it open when it got stuck halfway.

The place was almost empty. Yellow walls with paint flaking off in places, showing the skins beneath, older colors. One room, one bathroom down the hall, fairly clean, yellowing tiles. Small windows facing east, tiny kitchen. One twin bed, three chairs a table and a moldy sofa.

Not even close to the worst place she'd slept in. Perfect for setting up her op.

She kicked the door closed, locked it, settled the sack on the ground and her backpack much more carefully on the sofa. She considered the table, the apartment itself, and then decided.

She cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, methodically, till her hands were red and her knees sore. Then she set all the cleaning suplies in a neat row under the sink, looked at them for a few moments and decided that she would get some dye too, and a chemistry for children, as soon as she could. She didn't think she'd need poisons anytime soon, but she liked being prepared.

The router was the one she set up first. Even as she connected the lines she started to feel better, lighter. In her element again.

Her Asus RT-AC66U was a thing of beauty. The fastest in the market, right over the 802.11ac standard, with the most features - including a cloud-storage service, the protection of which she had designed herself, and which allowed her to to sync files on any device and provided remote access to any PC on her network.

Her PC was next. It looked like a normal 2012 MacBook Pro, but she had customized all its interiors and replaced all traceable parts, keeping only the high-resolution desktop and the backlit keyboard - which was such a simplistic stroke of genius it had made her smile wide and burn with rarewant the first time she'd seen it. She had designed a CPU fast enough to perform both brute force system-cracking and jobs of more finesse alike and set it up to run on a Kali Lunux OS. It was fucking gorgeous, in short. The highest form of art she could appreciate.

When everything was perfectly in order and she'd set a couple of booby traps by all the doors and windows, she got to work.

Hacking the city archive was a joke. She could have done it one handed, half asleep and from her phone.

She got all the blueprints she needed and saved them in her drive, Queen Manor and Queen Consolidated floorplans among them. She realized that she didn't have to hack into anything to get the full maps of Starling's underground though - she would have to break into the archives, because the records that she'd first thought were protected, were simply not digitalized yet.

Around midday, she decided that she would do the assistant and the accountant that day, and top it off with a trip to the city archives later that night.

After she found Melissa Johnson's and Rey Abbott's home addresses, she went to her room and stripped of both clothes and weapons. From the pile of folded clothes on the bed, she chose a pair of dark jeans, a black turtleneck and a sweatshirt of the same color. She thoroughly cleaned her boots ( and then the shower-plank ) before putting them on again.

In the mirror, she scrutinized her face carefully. She was still undecided about the bleached eyebrows. She liked how much they changed her face, how distracting they made her look, but couldn't be sure about keeping them. She wouldn't know what face she'd need to wear until she knew more about which one Oliver Queen would rather see.

She hid her curls beneath a beanie, darkened her eyebrows with a pencil and covered the curving scar on her cheekbone with high-coverage foundation, so that she wouldn't draw attention. In the end, she added some pale pink lipstick too. A fresh faced, but unremarkable girl stared back at her from the mirror. With her backpack over her shoulder, she would pass for another student on her day off, strolling up and down Starling to familiarize herself with her new city. Nothing to see there.

She repaired the almost nonexistent lining along the pockets of her dark green jacket before going out, pocketed an ID that said her name was Vanessa Ives and went out the door.

Melissa Johnson's building had been too easy to break into. The security so lax that it irritated her, despite making her job easier. As Moira Queen's assistant's, she should afford better places to live in, but then again it didn't matter. She compromised her router and copied her IP address before leaving as quietly as she had come. Rey Abbott, on the other hand, lived on the better side city. Her building had locked double doors, a state of the art alarm system, and cameras on every floor.

As she waited for someone to enter the building, she relied a lot on Vanessa Ives being unremarkable as she drank her hot coffee there on the sidewalk. She had a decoder with her but didn't like using it unless she had no other choices, and she most certainly didn't like using it in the middle of the day and right on a busy street. So she waited for 30 minutes before a young woman of maybe 20 approached the building. Vanessa Ives gave the stranger a friendly smile and kept walking up and down the entrance as if she was waiting for someone.

She had no trouble looking over the girl's shoulder as she punched in the code. 2374.

She waited five minutes more before she went to the door. She tried the code and the door buzzed open; paid the cameras no mind after she spotted the model. They were a the kind that were activated only if an alarm for a break-in or an attack was sounded on the property. Farther in, to the left of the elevator, there was a door with another code lock. She tried 2374 and it worked for the entrance to the cellar level and rubbish room. It was all she could do not to roll her eyes. So sloppy it was almost offensive. She used a set of picklocks Nyssa had gifted her two years ago to open a locked door to what seemed to be a meeting room for the condominium association. At the back of the cellar was a hobby room and - finally - the building's small electrical room.

She examined the meters, fuse boxes, and junction boxes and then took out a small electrical cuff that one of her less-sociable contacts had put together, and snapped it around one of the main lines of the building.

The lights flickered and then shut off. She had ten minutes.

She was out of there in six.

She opened and then closed the door with one hand, her shopping bags on the other. Set her hardware store purchases on the kitchen table, along with her backpack, some cleaning supplies and a Big Belly's Children Special. She booted up MacBook Pro, started running the programs that would connect her to the systems she just compromised and turned the laptop, so that she could see it from the kitchen table a few feet away where she busied herself eating.

She shoved a some fries into the small mayo cup and then in her mouth, then licked the salt off her fingers. Toyed with the red figurine she found inside, after she assembled it between one big bite and another. The little red pony with a nylon mane pulling a tiny cart behind him amused her, for some reason.

In the meantime, characters kept appearing on the screen of her laptop even though she was not typing. Melissa Johnson was busy responding to Moira Queen's emails. The window open next to that one showed Felicity Moira's calendar and her appointment schedule for at least the next two months.

When she was done with the food, she threw away the cartoons and started perusing the rest of the city maps. She decided on establishing her secondary base in one of the old empty houses right at the edge of the Glades. It was right close enough, and above one of the biggest nodes of the underground railway that wasn't used anymore. For that reason alone it was strategically perfect. She opened her mailing list and send a sparsely worded message in german to one of her contacts; ran it through a PGP encryption program before she send it.

In the next hour she found from Moira Queen's money movements and her assistants notations, that the same firm was used to provide security at both Queen Manor and Queen Consolidated. She studied the system for a few moments before deciding she would wire up the manor that same night. Queen Consolidated would take a bit more work.

They were smart, there were no blindspots in the perimeter - she had to make one, to get through.

According to 'Milton International' records, their routines had been changed the second week of October, for the first time in four years. That had been three days after Oliver Queen came back to Starling.

She didn't believe in that kind of coincidence.

But Oliver Queen was not currently at home. He was jumping on rooftops in the Glades. If he didn't die, he'd have a full night tonight: he was hitting the Triad. And Thea Queen… Thea Queen was at a party with her friends - she'd left the house hours ago. Moira Queen on the other hand, was the kind of woman to be asleep at 2 a.m.

The grounds of the estate were vast. That was an issue sometimes, when estates like that had to deal with people like her.

Most normal people had strange ideas about infiltration. The truth is that the human eye perceives movement quicker than size or color, so the trick is usually to move slow. And so she did - using the deep shadows of the moonless night to make her way through the surrounding woods. She closed in on the southern entrance, and slithered inside the house through a small trapdoor that took her right into the cellar.

She would have known where to find that door even without the houses blueprints.

Her soft-soled boots didn't make a sound as she landed on the stones of the Queen's cellar. The whole house was sleeping. Moira never liked people making noises up and down once she retired for the night.

She moved very quietly through the shelves of wine and rare vintages, her attention concentrated on getting into the electrical room, where she cloned the settings of the router and the IP address.

She was just about to leave when she stopped.

She was here, in his home. His room was just a few floors above her. There were always unsuspecting amounts of information to be gathered from someone's private spaces. There was no reason not to turn around and sneak into his room tonight. She knew that that if she didn't, she'd just have to come back another time and that would have been wasteful and sloppy. She was neither.

She curled her hands into firsts, threads of anger tainting her artificial calm: she didn't want to turn around.

… Strange, she thought absently, that 'want' should make itself known here and now, when she so often forgot it existed. But because this 'not wanting' had, curiously, made itself known now; because it was another piece of her, she went against ingrained instincts to keep it there. She turned around and walked out of the cellar, through the wide Queen mansion corridors and right into his room.

She closed the door of his room softly after herself and paused.

It was… something, being in that room again. She wasn't sure what, exactly. ( She was never sure what it was she felt, or even if she did feel anything .) She dismissed it.

His room was as irritatingly tidy now as it had been back then. Looked as tastefully unlived now, as it had back then too. Sometimes she remembered. Other times she just thought she did. That was why she never trusted memory. But she did trust facts. A rueful smile twisted her lips when she saw the painting of a sailing boat over his bed.

He always had had a sick sense of humour.

She knew right then and there though, that she would find nothing of use in this room. He didn't live here. She'd have to find his base, she thought as she stepped further in. That's where she would learn Oliver Queen.

His space smelled of what she imagined was his soap. She noticed the picture frame on his nightstand - an old photo of his sister, next to a recent one. She looked at them next to each other. Saw how the smile that once curved all of Thea's features into joy, was now tempered. Almost absent from her eyes now.

She had changed too.

Tragedy was like an inkstain in the water, its dark tendrils spread everywhere, until it infected all with its own color, knowing no mercy.

Not even for you , she thought, as her gloved fingers hovered over Thea's face.

She methodically went through his drawers, taking care to disturb even the dust as little as possible. She was surprised there even was dust. Clearly, he didn't let Raisa clean up after him anymore. The newfound neatness must be all his.

None of the drawers were locked. She found nothing on interest in them. Not even a wallet.

She searched the corners of his room - the places where she would have hidden her weapons. Smiled when she found a first aid kit taped against the underside of the bed, a Colt.45 Magnum and a long curved blade under his work table. There was a hole behind his closet where he'd stashed a metal box. She didn't open it but when she shook it, the click was muffled. Did he had explosives in there? Bullets? All his jackets had hidden pockets and at least three of them were heavier than they should be.

You have grown into one very paranoid individual haven't you, Queen?

She became even more aware of how careful she'd have to be skirting the edges of his life.

She stopped on her way to his bathroom, taking note of the drag-marks scratched on the wooden floors. She tried to recall his room as it had been once. What had been there?

A mirror. A wide and tall mirror, right against the wall, with wooden decorations along the sides.

Not there anymore. Huh.

All the products he used were neatly lined in his bathroom. Their scent was more pronounced there. It was spotless too. There was no mirror there either.

Once it was happenstance. Twice it was patter. They made pieces of a puzzle she'd have to put together.

She went through his cabinet. No pills, no alcohol-based medication. She did find ace bandages though. And, to her mild surprise, a very small glass shard stuck against the sink.

She bent down, inspecting the tiles closely. She found two other minute fragments.

You broke that mirror, didn't you? Interesting .

She'd be willing to bet her Linux OS that he'd crawled beneath the sink just like she was doing and picked all the shards up himself so that nobody would have to see them.

But that was conjecture.

She already had access to the home's network, but she decided to clone his hard drive too before she left. She doubted she'd find anything in his home computer, but it never hurt to be safe.

On her way back to her apartment she stopped at a the only Kosher 7-Eleven in the Glades even if it was 10 minutes out of her way, and bought a week's worth of food. Some frozen pizza, three frozen fish casseroles, two vegetarian pies, two pounds of apples, a loaf of bread, a pound of cheese and a carton of milk. She walked up Roden Street to Woodland and then turned left for her building.

She put one of the pizzas in the microwave, drank milk straight from the carton and then booted up her computer and logged into the mirrored copy of Oliver Queen's hard drive. She spent the next half hour going through the contents of his computer. She found absolutely nothing of interest. Apart from the occasional search on Starling city crime rates and several newspaper sites, he seemed to use his home computer rarely. There was not even any porn in it.

If she only knew his name and what she used to know of him, she would have found that very strange indeed. As it was, it didn't surprise her.

The memory came unbidden, like a slap to the face that stung throughout her whole body.

Of his smooth-cheeked face, eyes wide and panicking because a virus had frozen his father's laptop on a porn site. She remembered being irritated and really amused at the same time. She'd helped him – she remembered how much she'd enjoyed watching Oliver fucking Queen blush all the way to the tips of his ears.

He hadn't liked her back then.

She gulped, her breathing fast and shallow… she hadn't thought about this in so long. She didn't even know these thoughts still crawled along the corners of her mind.

But they floated up now, like dead things in the water.

Her heart beat hard against her breastbone. The memory wasn't old and faded like an old photograph – the way most of her memories from that other life were. It was vivid, as real and electric as… as very few things she could recall. Only her nightmares felt as real most of hte time. But that memory ripped through her mind and slammed to the very forefront of it violently. Made her clench her teeth and fist her hands so hard her nails drew blood on the fleshy part of her palm.

She was sweating when she came back to herself, cold shivers shaking her.

She got up so fast from the chair it almost fell back and shoved herself in the shower, the ice cold water beating down on her distracting her from anything else. She stayed there for a good ten minutes. Then she got out, got dressed and ran for a full three hours, until she couldn't feel her legs anymore and her lungs burned.

She crawled back to her apartment, fell asleep fully dressed and grossly sweaty the second her head hit the pillow. Dreamt of vicious storms and the depths of dark places.

When she woke the next morning, she felt like stepped-on wet shit. Not even her contact responding with a very short 'Done' could lift her mood much. It was short and to the point, the way Vibe knew she appreciated. She admitted to herself that despite her foul mood, that message was a good way to start a new day. Or it would have been, if she the insides of her eyelids didn't feel like they had turned to sandpaper.

She stripped, drank what was left of her coffee, put on a fresh pair of clothes without bothering to shower, packed her laptop and went to set up her base.

A white van was parked in front of the section of three story houses. It was no different from the vans of the drycleaning store across the street and that was a good thing. The house itself was empty and almost falling apart from disuse, but she didn't care about that. It was the wide basement she cared for, the way it was connected by a small trapdoor to the underground tunnels of the city that had once been used to smuggle booze and were now sealed.

Nobody know they were there - there had been no mapping for this section of them. She had found them accidentally, observing the missing pieces of different maps.

In the corner of the first floor, just by the main entrance, she saw a sheet throw over what she knew to be a Kawasaki 125. Her lips twitched upwards a bit. The bike was a lightweight 125cc. She had restored it and and done a bit of tinkering of her own to set it for running just a bit over the legal limit. Not the toughest bike in the world, true, but it was certainly one of the fastest. And it was hers. She was getting tired of public transportation anyway.

It's presence there however, when last she remembered she had stored in in New Orleans, was Vibe's doing. He knew her only by her cyber name, but had never made it a secret that he liked her, thought she had never quite understood the full reasons why. He had the social aptitude of a happy child and though she would never say that was distasteful, it did make him into a completely foreign creature to her. But he was also undoubtedly a genius. What equipment she did not built herself, she got from him. In the end he was utterly non threatening in his admiration, which was centered on her intellect rather than attraction, and that was why she was still comfortable working with him. For her own part, she had never encouraged either, but she avoided being rude to him. He was too useful to alienate.

She unloaded the boxes with her materials from the van and carried them down one by one. Chose one of the larger alcoves of the tunnel system to set up her equipment - a circular room with a high ceiling, that must have been used as a gathering place for any meetings, once. It had good insulation and five different escape routes from that one room alone.

She cleaned it up as best as she could, then set up the electrical system by connecting it to the one of the building above and spent the rest of the day setting up her equipment.

Nyssa always thought she overdid it by having a secondary base, when she could pick a single one on high ground and use that to her advantage. But then again, Nyssa had never been particularly sensitive to the real nature of her work. She could hack from her laptop in Vanessa Ives' apartment, but she could not store the data there. Once she was done wiring up all the sources of information, there would be quite a lot of information to store. Surveillance feeds, both audio and video, tracked phone calls, credit card payments, GPS tracking. She couldn't operate all of it through one computer and most certainly not in a small rundown Glades apartment.

Once she was done it was nightfall, she was covered in dust, and dirt, smelled of bleach, sweat and burnt plastic. It was only once she had not immediate work that she realized she was hungry too.

She dug the chocolate bars from her bag along with the chips and a bottle of water and a protein shake, then turned on the monitors. She devoured the chocolate and then the chips as she waited, reclining on the high-backed chair as she system turned on.

She spent the next week finishing setting up the surveillance on all the important nodes of Oliver Queen's life and going through the data she was able to collect. She worked almost sixteen hours a day, sometimes more, combing the information. Like a disease, she spread her contamination through all the corners of his life and the people in it: his circle or relatives, their spouses, their jobs, their companies, their friends. Everything. She was curiously uncomfortable when it came to reading Thea's texts and conversations, but they did give her insight.

Thea was disappointed with her brother, though the reason why kept changing. She was depressed and abusing substances in a way that may hint at a real problem beyond just rebellion, but that was not… she took a deep breath and reminded herself that that was not her concern.

None of the things she had learned (all the people she once knew) were her concern. They were information. That was all.

The bugs she'd planted in Oliver Queen's room told her two things. He rarely spoke and almost never first. He only responded when other people spoke to him. And that he had nightmares, sometimes violent ones. Sara's name often could be discerned from his mumblings. ( she had felt ice splinter in her stomach, when she'd head another name, a familiar one she hadn't heard in years ) She'd been right to assume he hadn't forgotten anything.

The person he had the most contact outside his family was John Diggle. It took erh only three days of observing their movements to realize Mr. Diggle was in on Queen's night secret. He, too, ended up on her surveillance list. A few hours looking him up revealed him to be more interesting than she'd first thought, though how Queen had gone about recruiting him was still a bit of a mystery.

Through John Diggle she found Lyla Michaels however, and the moment she saw that face, she paused. She had a single moment of hesitation, before irritation took over. ARGUS was a fucking nuisance she did not want to deal with.

She decided she'd follow John Diggle around anyway though, to get a feel of where their base was. Queen was too sensitive and too paranoid. It wasn't worth the risk of getting caught yet.

Even as she worked she knew that no matter how hard she dug it would be surface work.

She decided to leave his ARGUS files for last.

She planned breaking in into his hidey-hole for three days - and chose a day when she knew both him and John Diggle would be tied up elsewhere. It was a bit prosaic that he'd chose his secret lair beneath the club he owned, but then again, that seemed to fit him.

It wasn't has hard as she'd anticipated. He was either sloppy or arrogant. She broke through his electronic lock in forty-five seconds.

She headed for his computer as soon as soon as she spotted it, fished out a USB port from the inside pocket of her jacket and connected it to his server, then started one of her personal programs. Its only function was to upgrade Internet Explorer on Oliver's computer to a more modern version. The program looked and behaved exactly like the original version, but it was a tiny bit larger and a microsecond slower. All installations were identical to the original, including the install date. There would be no trace of the new file.

She typed in an FTP address for a server in Holland and got a command screen. She clicked copy, named it 'Oliver Queen II' and clicked OK. The computer instantly began copying Oliver's hard drive to the server in Holland. As it processed, she realized that the protection coding for the servers was in cyrillic. She smiled.

He'd learned how to apply his intelligence, apparently.

A clock indicated that the process would take fifteen minutes. She used that time to look around, learning more about his habits and the truths of him by being in that space for fifteen minutes than she had in the last two weeks rummaging through the corners of his life.

He was obsessive about his weapons - all his arrows were lined up neatly. His workspace was clean, but not very tidy. There was no apparent system to the way he had arranged his space either. Just by the layout she could tell he didn't plan to keep this going long.

He either planned to die or end this quickly.

She had no idea what he was doing though. Or why. Nothing she found there helped her understand either.

She needed to know both so that she could construct her own persona for him. As she kept peeling back his layers she was constantly redefining the ones that would be her own.

Who would you want me to be, Oliver Queen?

How did he target people? His system made no sense at all, if Laurel was talked out of the picture. And apart from a couple of cases, he hadn't interfered much with her.

She didn't find much of an answer in his base either, and that was disheartening.

Time to calculate a readjustment in tactics.

Figuring out his timetable had been tricky. He had no fixed hours and unlike John Diggle, he was always freakishly aware of his surroundings so she never followed him. She'd had to hack his phone and since she couldn't follow him, she had to learn to anticipate his movements based on conversations he had. She kept her distance, watched him from a few streets away or through whatever cameras available when he was out at night. Watched and took note of how we sweeped a room as soon as he entered it, sweeped people. He missed nothing about anything his environment. He probably relied on awareness of his surroundings heavily, using terrain to his advantage even when he fought, as well as the strength of his own body.

In daylight hours he moved differently. Stiffly almost. He was controlled, but less confident out of that Hood than he was in it.

She stood on the other side of the building, looked at him having lunch with a brunette woman with a red lips that gave crooked smiles.

Helena Bertinelli.

The first thing she had found out about about Bertinelli was her father's organised crime network. There was no doubt there would be more for her to dig there. An interesting choice of company.

The woman couldn't be of a more different background than Laurel, so much that that made them almost feel like they were polar opposites. But they were similar enough in appearance. She wondered if Oliver realized he had a type. That he seemed to look for different versions of Laurel Lance in different women. She wondered if he realized how hurtful that kind of carelessness could be, once understood. And then Sara came to mind. That happy smile she'd had on her round face, and that she remembered the way she remembered every scar she had on her own body. The way it had fallen when their eyes had met across that narrow corridor.

She didn't know him now, but going from past experience, the answer was probably 'no'.

There weren't many pictures of him online since he came back. Most of them were blurred. A couple were of when he'd given a speech for the inauguration of QC's new Applied Sciences division. The speech itself had been rather interesting. He admired his father perhaps, but his eyes as he said those words had been cold.

Such a bad liar.

He was so deep in his role, so divided between his two lives, that he had forgotten how to react like a person. Though he seemed more relaxed with Bertinelli than she'd seen him elsewhere. His smile was subtler than it used to be, like his face had forgotten how. He looked older. His hair was shorter. He kept his cheeks scruffy, as if he was always in need of every insulation he could afford between himself and the world. He looked tan.

Where have you been ?

She watched him and wondered, how could one get away with lying to someone who lived and breathed by being braced for deceit? Someone who was always so aware of where he was standing. A disguise was never as effective as when there was truth masking the deception beneath. She'd have to become part of his environment, but how could a liar survive in it, in a way that did not lead him to suspicion? How could she get close enough to slip between his ribs quietly?

What manner of person would someone like Oliver Queen ever allow that close?

One of the answers was staring at her in the face. She was elegant and poised. Tall, lean and strong, and she smiled like she was on her way to being dangerous.

She could become that. A version of that, anyway. Something like it. But she had a feeling that would not be the easiest way into him. Contrary to the obvious evidence, she didn't truly think that one of Oliver Queen's weaknesses was pretty women. In his case, as with most people, the obvious was superfluous. His truth ran deeper than that. It was subtler. She'd just had to find it.

And once she did, then what? How would she be able to bring his truth to life into her lie?

She couldn't, she realized. Because the obvious may be superfluous, but it did not nullify simple concepts like Occam's Razor and Murphy's law. Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected, because whatever can happen, will happen. In this case, the simplest hypothesis was that she would lie; and what could and would happen was that he would know.

She'd have to give him only truth.

The realization was as anticlimactic as it was potentially tricky. She had always known this - she regularly made use of truth every time she built someone to hide behind. But this time it was different from the others because Oliver Queen would demand truth from a very specific person… and she didn't know if there was enough of that person left or even of there was in her any truth to give.

He tilted his head to the side in the middle of the conversation, the look in his eyes suddenly unfocused. She turned the corner, disappearing out of sight just as he turned to look in her direction. A frown darkened his face, sharp eyes searching for whatever had been pricking at the back of his neck.

He saw nothing.

She followed him one day and found her legs freezing on the spot when his location turned out to be the graveyard. She was too far to even see the entrance, and yet she felt her heart hammer harder against her breastbone. A cold wave came over her and yet she felt like she was sweating.

Sometimes she hated how quick her brain was. How she could have five lines of thought at the same time, and how they made their way through her head faster than she could protect herself from them.

How she was able to connect Oliver Queen's presence in a cemetery with the fact that Sara's grave was in there, for instance. Understand that he was still haunted by the guilt of it, catalogue what that meant and all the ways she could use it… and also remember that she too had had a mother once. And that she didn't even know what had happened to her body.

She was almost frantic when she got on her bike three blocks down and got to her base. The perpetual chill of the underground translated into shivers as she searched for records of a woman who had died years ago. She'd had that same thought many times before, but she'd never looked. She'd been too afraid to. She was afraid even now, but she was also a long way away from anyone who could find out what she was doing… even though she could feel the Spider's stare heavy on the back of her skull.

'You're on a mission' , she kept saying. ' What are you doing? You are failing. You never fail.'

But that voice was not real. She told herself that over and over. Because it was not.

And yet, her fingers flew on the keyboard, her breathing was fast and she resisted the urge to look over her shoulder even though she had activated every last one of her security measures. She felt like she was being chased. Like the whole building would come down on top of her and she would be buried there alive forever.

She was shaking but she did not stop looking. She had to see this through before she lost her nerve.

After the autopsy had determined the cause of death to be a suicide, they had stored the body, which had not been reclaimed. Donna Smoak had had no relatives living, mother only to a child lost at sea, declared dead. Her savings had not been enough to cover her burial. After that there was only one add-in, made a month later, noting that the body had been burned.

She got up from her chair, went to one of the corners of the room and sat down with her back to the wall, knees drawn up tight to her chest.

She'd been burned.

A beastly feeling scratched at the insides of her ribs, burned all the way to her throat, closing around it like a fist. For the first time in years, she wished she remembered tears. But she did not.

Time started to loosen and melt, emptying of meaning. She didn't feel it passing. Between one blink and the next it had been hours.

The next morning she woke up in her bed and for the first time since she got there, she didn't immediately jump out of it. She didn't move at all, didn't feel like eve twitching. She had a very vague memory of dragging herself herself away from that corner, last night. Didn't remember with what will she'd managed to move again, or for what reason. She had stripped, showered, or it might have been a dream, she didn't know.

When one hour passed and she still hadn't moved from under the covers, she told herself that she had found a reason worth moving for yesterday, so she could use that same one today. Knowing the reason didn't matter. What mattered was that it had been a good enough to get her to this bed last night. Now it had to get her out of it.

It had to have been good enough. She'd moved. She'd survived before. She'd survived worse.

'We don't die quietly .'

She got up.

Helena Bertinelli turned out to be more than just a mob princess. Far more. She was well in her way to getting herself killed and starting a gang war that would terrorise the Glades in the meantime. This didn't seem to have any bearing on her behaviour.

More telling though, was the fact that Oliver knew this and she was still breathing. That was far enough out of his M.O. to catch her attention, but it did not exactly surprise her. Emotional attachment addled his brain, it seemed. Or was it sex?

It didn't matter, either way. Another layer off him. ( Another one for her to wear .)

It kept getting increasingly clear what she would have to do. She only hesitated because she was uncertain on the how. So she bid her time, searching for firmer ground.

She needed to understand better. Know more.

She left the others alone, didn't need them anymore to keep track of him. The net was already threaded around them. Every vibration of it fed her information. Now she needed to keep her eyes on the prey instead.

She took note of Oliver's every movement, becoming the shadow on every wall she could afford to darken around him. More often than not in the month she was the silent whisper behind the back of his neck, he was not alone.

The well-disciplined part of her rebelled against Bertinelli's kind of reckless mayhem. There were subtler ways to get vengeance. Better ways. Ways that seemed to escape Helena Bertinelli entirely. She was too blinded by her hatred. It had poisoned her - she'd kept it all in for too long. There were no traces of it anywhere in her life but in her eyes and the rage with which she fought.

She understood what Bertinelli and Queen saw in each other then.

You have a strange taste in women, Queen. ...And strange opinions of yourself, it seems.

He did not seem to understand that people were no better mirrors for him than the ones he'd removed from his room.

She watched them make the news together. Watched from afar as they seemed to fall apart and was almost horrified by how heartbroken Oliver Queen was when it all ended.

How was that possible?

He seemed so closed off, so stiff in everything he did. He was so suspicious, so paranoid that she didn't even dare trail him for too long. And yet he was stupidly vulnerable at the same time. He'd brought John Diggle in his operation at most a month after they met. He did the same with Helena Bertinelli even sooner than that.

He isolated himself so readily, locked so tight against all those he had a shred of memory of. She'd thought at first that this would be a serious problem, but soon understood it was a futile worry: solitude wasn't his nature. ( it never had been ). She'd spied him through the camera of his own computer sometimes, looking into his eyes as he stared off into nothingness, sometimes for whole hours. It reminded her of loitering in the big city zoos around the world, staring at the lions in their cages to remind herself what the true end of life looked like. She could always tell which ones were captured in the wild by the look in their eyes. Four hundred pounds of killing fury, locked in a box. The hunt still in their snarl, fury so violent it shook their bars.

But after a while, their eyes started to glaze over, and she could tell their soul had died.

No, isolation was not in his nature. On him, it was artificial. It fit him ill, he was too stubborn for it. Proof was the fact that he was still alive: he didn't know how to die quietly.

Just like her.

But there was something more than simply his nature that made him seek out humanity and want to hold on to it tight.

Are you afraid to be alone with yourself?

She had no idea what he'd thought she was doing with that woman when he taught her to use a crossbow, but she had no doubt that had been him. Bertinelli only used guns before she met him.

Had he tried to help her control herself? Was it arrogance? Was it desperation?

Could it be all three?

The more she watched him, the less sense he made. How was it possible that he attached himself so easily? Was he so lonely? If yes, why not share himself with Tommy? Laurel?

Was he ashamed?

She watched him muddle along day after day and she didn't understand. But she knew that despite everything that had happened and wherever he had been, he apparently still loved as easily as he had ever brought himself to want. Truly, but not deeply enough to hurt too much, and perhaps only for an hour.

And even that kind of love could be his undoing.

She knew that for a fact. It had been a thought that had germinated in her mind before she was even aware of it's presence. She couldn't watch him, learning him as she'd been trained to, and not think about all the ways someone like him could be undone. It was what she had been brought here to do after all. Learn if he could be of use to the League.

The League would enslave him and she knew all the ways how.

That night she was a ball of fury and disdain as she slithered to her base, taped her hands and trained until she was so exhausted she fell on the stone floor and curled up there, unwilling to move.

She woke up the at 4 am, jumping upright with her knife out, chest heaving and ready to stab someone's eye out before she realized nobody was upon her. She took deep breaths as she scanned the wide underground room. Pressed her hands hard against the stone floor to ground herself in reality again.

Once she felt as awake as she was supposed to be, she smelled herself and crunched up her nose. She felt gross, cold and stiff and her head pounded with the mother of headaches.

She walked back to her apartment, huddled around her jacket, her steps short and fast. Unafraid but strangely tired.

She climbed the stairs without making a sound, lifted the door a bit by the handle so that it would open without making a sound. Closed it behind herself softly. Striped on her way to the bathroom, letting her muddy and dusty clothes fall along the way without caring.

She didn't wait for the water to warm. She never did. The rivulets hit the tattoos on her shoulder and slid down her body by the others, washing the grime away. By the time it reached the drain it had turned red.

She frowned down at it.

What the…

It took the fraction of a second connect the dots. The little pains of discomfort around her abdomen and the shifting patterns of her hunger as of late. She was a bit surprised. Her cycle was very… whimsical, in general. She wouldn't get a period for a few months sometimes. It was generally a nuisance.

And so it was now, as well. She'd forgotten to get tampons. She sighed in irritation.

Fuck!

She did not sleep, despite her exhaustion, choosing to sit on the window seat looking out at deserted and sorry excuse of a park as her mind worked furiously. She sat quietly there for two hours, twisting the butterfly knife in her hands opened and closed first with one hand and then with the other, until the sky lightened and another grey day came around. She had a number of strategic decisions to make – and she had to do a risk assessment.

In truth, she had known she'd had have to get close to him from the very beginning. This was her speciality. It was why she had been send here in the first place. She was the best the Spider had ever trained, but it had been her own methods to make her so. If Ra's had wanted this done some other way, he would have sent someone else.

But he had not. He had sent his best hunter. He'd wanted a perfect work.

He always did, when he thought he saw versions of strength that mirrored his.

It would be… unusual, and certainly tricky, but not impossible. She'd accomplished far harder tasks. But admittedly, she'd never done so in the face of someone who knew her ghost.

She was still uncertain of the odds because she wasn't sure if she would be able to be what he would need her to be. She had forgotten the girl Oliver Queen remembered her as. That person had been ripped from her. She didn't know what remained, and that was what was causing her disquiet - because she would have to find out, wouldn't she?

She made up her mind, got up and slipped in her bed. She fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow; woke up groggy and unrested two hours later, by the beeping of her phone's alarm.

She was glad for the aches and pains that followed her around as she drank her protein shake and made coffee. As usual she drank her milk straight from the cartoon, shoved half a bar of chocolate between two slices of bread and ate that on the way to the flea market.

She bought black jeans and pants of stretchable material, easy to move into. T shirts, sweaters, blouses, scarves and hats. One or two of each, all in different shades of black and grey. All ripped in some places, frayed in others, with obscene writings here and there. Whatever amused her. Whatever caught her eye. It was strange, choosing like this. It was calculated too.

She dropped those at her apartment and as she did the trips back and forth she started to realize she missed having a car for these things.

She bought hair dyes and various other products that she thought she might need at one of the better shops close to downtown. When the shopkeepers at the beauty store tried to dissuade her from certain products, she simply ignored them.

She ordered takeout at a Greek restaurant close by, before calling it a day and then methodically dismantled the food on the unsteady table of her kitchen even though she wasn't hungry at all.

She felt dimmed, her limbs heavy and numb, when she next stood in front of the mirror in her apartment's small bathroom. She looked at herself carefully, taking in every feature. Her pale face, small eyes and narrow mouth, pointed chin. Her face, a blank canvas.

She turned around and picked up the bag full of hair and makeup. Time to change skin.

She lined all the products she would need on the small table she had moved to the bathroom. There was a reason for every little detail. Every single inch of her construction was going to serve a purpose. Either to him… or to herself.

She had considered letting him see her just as she was. Fresh faced and pale, her hair curly as it used to be, neither dark nor light, but rather stuck in between. She'd considered it, but she couldn't, and not just because trying to make him think she was as she had been would be the flimsiest lie of all. It was simply against her nature and her instinct; that kind of thinking had been drilled out of her. She could not be bare. She couldn't stand the thought of it. She too needed insulation from the world ( and from all prying eyes ), same as he did. She needed a mask.

She'd chosen this.

It was thin enough a disguise for him to see through. She didn't know what would be beneath it, but that didn't worry her anymore. He would use her as a mirror, same has he seemed to use everyone around him, and she would reflect back to him half an imagine, leave the other half for him to fill on his own.

As she waited for the dark brown dye to take, she prepared the bleach for those three strands at the top of her head that she would dye purple. She put in the round ring-piercing at the corner of her lower lip and through her eyebrow. They were simple, thin rings of metal, but they did the job.

She washed off the dye, dried her hair, put on the bleach, waited till the strands were whitened enough, washed the bleach off and dried her hair again before applying the purple dye. It was a tiresome process, but she needed it. She painted her nails a metallic dark grey as she waited for the color to take.

Once she was done, she examined the end result as her new hair dried, tightening in frizzy curls around her head.

She would straighten it.

She didn't bother with foundation. She was not neglecting detail, on the contrary: neither perfectionism nor neartness were the point of this look. She darkened her eyebrows back to brown because she needed him to recognize her. Applied dark liner carefully on her eye's waterline and covered her lids with equally dark eyeshadow. She made it messy, because it served her to look that way.

Angry and young. The way Thea was.

Not blatantly, like she'd considered before, but rather subtly . Enough to affect him but without him realizing exactly why. A whisper-quiet thread to wrap tight around his real weakness.

She tinted her lips with a maroon lipstick, looked at the reflection for a few moments then decided to wipe it off, try a slightly darker shade. Better.

She took in the finished effect from every angle. She tilted her chin down and looked at the girl in the mirror through her eyelashes, arched her eyebrows up for innocence.

Yes, it would work.

It should anyway. But all this was just facade. She'd have to fill it with substance. Dig it from whatever corner of herself where she kept those lost pieces and wear them too.

She gritted her teeth. This was why she had been so angry. Not the mission itself, but the lack of choice that it involved. The way it forced her into places she didn't want to be.

Choice. Want… Anger.

All things she should not know anymore. She was on a mission. This should be no different to her than any other mission before it, but the face in the mirror does not reflect that as much as she would have liked. She was not enough of a stranger to the girl in the mirror.

She turned her head, caught a glimpse of the girl in the mirror. Her new self. Round shoulders, round figure, a black bra against too pale skin. Every feature drawn into sharp relief now. She looked at her tattoos and scars beneath them, black sweatpants hanging low.

How much of who she was building herself to be was true and which parts were the lie? She's forgotten so much, lost even more. She'd have to believe her own deception now, or he would believe none of it.

She looked away.

She had considered how to show herself to him for a long time. From the moment she had realized that she would have to, which had been around three hours after she got her assignment.

She had considered ways to go about establishing herself as nonthreatening. She didn't want to be a target to either Oliver Queen or John by John Diggle.

As she had considered the alternatives - drop in and help him? Save him? Get him out of a hairy situation? - she had realized that it was not to Oliver that she needed to make this point. He would be shaken enough just by seeing her again, but John Diggle would have no reason to be.

He was the one that would be a problem for her.

In the end, she discarded all those alternatives and decided to play it passively. She would not do anything - she'd would leave the action to him.

Let him find her. Let him think he was in control and that whatever happened, had happened that way because it had been his choice.

Let him be comfortable.

He stalked people, she thought as she walked along Wentwood street; Big Belly burger was two blocks up. It was the only way he knew how to keep things under control. Whatever place he had been in, he had never really left it. She knew that the moment he got a glimpse of her, he would follow her.

She'd been getting closer and closer to him all week, letting that tingling feeling settled over him and moving away just a moment before he could catch a glimpse of her. He had to know by now that he was being watched. He probably was antsy as hell about it too.

She'd wondered before about what would catch his eye. What would shake him enough to disregard safety and basic rules of stalking a target. She'd realized after careful consideration that she didn't need to do anything. One look of her face, even as she was, would be enough.

She just needed to get close enough. Just enough for him to catch a glimpse.

She stopped, looked at the small diner on the other side of the street. He was seated with his back to the wall, on a point where he could keep a clear line of sight on the front door the corridor that led further into the diner and the window. She leaned against the broken streetlight and just stared right at him.

He was in there with John Diggle. They went for burgers at least once a week or so. This was the closest she'd been to him yet.

This time, when he froze in his seat she didn't move. When he looked into the street… and right into her eyes, she didn't run. She unflinchingly met his shock, the way he seemed to crumble with it right there in his seat. When he shook his head minutely in disbelief, she curled one corner of her mouth up.

' _I am as real as you are. I'm here_. '

John Diggle turned but he didn't see what Oliver Queen saw. She doubted anyone could.

She moved only when he did. He, to get up. She, to run.

She heard heard his footfalls even from across the street. She didn't turn around - instead, she ran faster.

' _Come and get me_ .'

* * *

Songs:

 **A Pair Of Doves** by Trent Reznor - _Starling City Skyline_

 **Infiltrator** by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - _Hacking Theme: 'Information junkie'_

 **She Reminds Me Of You** by Atticus Ross - _Building the web, one fine thread at a time (tripping on a ghost memories)_

 **The Sound Of Forgetting** by Trent Reznor  & Atticus Ross - _Becoming Theme: 'I am Felicity Smoak. I am Felicity Smoak… I am… I…'_

 **The Hunted** by Snow Ghosts - _The hunt begins_


End file.
